date added column blank

Question

date added column blank

i love the date added column. I think it's one of the best unmentioned new features in Lion.

I reinstalled OS 10.7 2 days ago, went through all of the updates to get current, because I was unhappy with the speed of my iMac 27, 3.4 Ghz & 16 gigs of RAM. The speed is unacceptable. (nothing changed, speed-wise)

Today I notice the Date Added column in any finder window is blank, except for 2 hyphens "– –".

Has anyone seen this or heard of it before? Did I hit a switch or turn something off by accident? I haven't made any other changes besides the reinstall.

What am I missing here?

Thanks,

Gregg

iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.2), iMac 27" 3.4 Ghz 16 GB

Posted on Feb 1, 2012 6:34 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

TheSmokeMonster

Level 4

3,246 points

Feb 1, 2012 7:17 PM in response to Gregg Luhring

spotlight needs to reindex the hard drive to figure out the date added.

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Answer 2

Feb 8, 2012 6:35 AM in response to TheSmokeMonster

My "Date Added" columns also went blank. Will spotlight automatically reindex or do i need to initiate the reindexing in some way?

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Answer 3

Feb 8, 2012 8:32 AM in response to Gregg Luhring

Thanks SmokeMonster, That did it. Actually I had installed Lion on an external drive and forced indexing to stop by putting my other drives into Privacy in Spotlight. I didn't realize that it would carry on when I went back to running on my internal drive.

Paul Williams3, open Spotlight in System Preferences. Click on the Privacy tab and drag your hard drive(s) into the list to prevent Spotlight from indexing. I think you get an "Are you sure you want to do this?" message. Go ahead. This deletes the spotlight index of whatever you drag in there.

When you select whatever you put in there and click the minus button at the bottom left of the window, Spotlight will immediately begin to reindex.

Have a good day!

Gregg

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Answer 4

Feb 8, 2012 8:53 AM in response to Gregg Luhring

Thanks Gregg! My spotlight is working and my "Date Added" columns are back to normal.

Would you (or anybody else) know if spotlights indexing of a drive could prevent the unmounting of that drive?

I was running DiskWarrior last night from an external startup drive and it said it was unable to unmount my internal drive to complete the rebuild of the directory and it recommended i quit all applications that might be using that drive. I was just thinking, if spotlight was indexing in the background, maybe that was the application tying up the drive. A few hours later, DiskWarrior was able to unmount the internal drive and rebuild the directories ... i'm thinking spotlight may have completed its indexing.

I'm just thinking outlloud. Thanks for the help!!!

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Answer 5

Feb 8, 2012 8:58 AM in response to Paul Williams3

Yes, Spotlight will cause a drive to be busy. That's exactly what I was doing. Running Disk Warrior. So I stopped Spotlight to allow the internal drive to be unmounted.

Ha. Ha. Coincidence...

Gregg

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Answer 6

Feb 8, 2012 9:11 AM in response to Gregg Luhring

I must have missed the part where you mentioned Disk Warrior. Very good. I'm glad that's resolved.

Thanks Gregg! 🙂

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