Q: Spotlight not working correctly

Just wanted to note that Christopher Murphy's solution worked for me (this is on 10.6.8):

sudo mdutil -i off /

sudo mdutil -E /

sudo rm -Rf /var/folders/*

Reboot.

sudo mdutil -i on /

I know a lot of people have posted solutions, but this is the only one that has worked for me.  And, its only useful if you have a good amount of free disk space.  My Spotlight wasn't searching the contents of files, like it was in Snow Leopard.  I copied my entire documents folder and placed it on my Desktop, and everything works fine now.

Hope that helps.

I came across this little write up on monitoring Mountain Lion with Activity Monitor:

http://scsc-online.com/Activity%20Monitor.html

Found it interesting that they used mds and Spotlight as an example of something you might want to monitor if you're having problems.

I had the same problem on 10.7.5 with spotlite not searching hardrive or email. After reading loads of solutions about adding harddrive in the privacy panel or using terminal to re-index, I simply opened the spotlite preferences from the system preferences then unchecked and then rechecked all the items listed in the spotlite search results panel.  This worked

I had the same problem on 10.7.5 with spotlite not searching hardrive or email. After reading loads of solutions about adding harddrive in the privacy panel or using terminal to re-index, I simply opened the spotlite preferences from the system preferences then unchecked and then rechecked all the items listed in the spotlite search results panel.  This worked

This has been a pretty useful thread. One thing I learned quickly in trying to make an old TM backup searchable was to just go straight to root user. In the terminal, type sudo su. Enter your password and you are god of your computer and any volumes mounted. The other thing is the command line TM tools. You can "inherit" a TM backup using the tmutil command. Apple, for good reason, doesn't put this power in the hands of GUI-only users, but you can accomplish almost everything you want with mdutil and tmutil if you sudo su to root.

If you search on tmutil, you'll find a ton of helpful info.

sudo mdutil -i off /

sudo mdutil -E /

sudo rm -Rf /var/folders/*

Reboot.

sudo mdutil -i on /

That solved the problem for me, too. It seems that deleting the Spotlight cache and re-enabling the indexing is the answer...

I was having the same problem and followed your advice but it didn't immediately work. Once I restarted my computer, though, it was gold. Cheers.

Two things I discovered while investigating this same issue:

32-bit Spotlight Importers

These seem to be one of the reasons mds and mdworker (the system processes behind Spotlight) were tripping up and failing to complete the index.  (And might explain the mysterious "Unable to talk to lsboxd" messages.) Since mds and mdworker are 64-bit processes, it probably couldn't work with the older 32-bit Spotlight Importers (I found three on my system).

To find out if you have any, use Terminal.app and enter this command:   mdimport -L

That'll give you a list of paths where you can find each of the Spotlight Importers (some are embedded in third-party applications).  Use the Finder "Go to Folder..." command to open the enclosing folder of each Spotlight Importer.  In the Finder, "Get Info" on each to see if it says "(32-bit)". I moved these to the trash and tried the process suggested above and it seemed to work better.

Rebuild Mail.app mailboxes

This was what finally got Spotlight to index email that hadn't been included in previous attempts, even following the processes suggested above and elsewhere. Only after Mail.app rebuild the mailboxes did Spotlight begin to return search results from those locations.

Hello everyone.

I have a iphone4 (ipdates to ios7)

My problem is that suddenly i cant find MOST (not everyone) of my contacts.

not is the spotlight and not in the adress book - altough everyone is still there.

i tries to turn it off & on, i even erased and synced it again threw icloud,

but nothing seems to work.

(i still cant find my father (-: althoght he is the first to apear in the list)

what should i do smart people .. . .. ?!

Hello @avivoni,

Why are you asking this here ? It is not related to the current topic. I suggest you:

1. if you believe it is related to spotlight, read the previous posts from the previous pages, you may find useful tricks to reset spotlight

2. to google or search for your problem

3. If you really don't find, open a new topic

4. File a bug at bugreport.apple.com, apple fellows will help you.

Thank you for your quick reply.

I tried to read all the coments

and did what they said...

but the problem did not disapear.

should i and how do i open a new topic ?

Changing the lanquage (from Hebrew to Engligh) helped me..

Thankyou (-:

I will confirm that Chris' code worked for me too.

Quit all applications except Terminal, issued the following two commands:

sudo mdutil -i off /

sudo mdutil -E /

sudo rm -Rf /var/folders/*

Reboot.

sudo mdutil -i on /

Same OSX version ten, six, eight.

Nice work Christopher.

Thank you

Message was edited by: Todd Jacobs