Spotlight and Time Machine broken after restore/upgrade

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Spotlight and Time Machine broken after restore/upgrade

I've found a few similar threads to this but none of those solutions has worked for me.

Two things happened at nearly the same time, so I don't exactly know the source of my problem:

I upgraded my old MacBook Pro (approx. Oct 2010, 2.66GHz I think, 300GB-ish HD) from Lion to Mountain Lion
The hard drive on my old MacBook Pro developed a terminal fault, so I had to buy a new one (8GB, 750GB HD) and restore a month-old Time Machine backup from my external drive.

I can't remember whether my last Time Machine backup to my external drive was before or after I upgraded to Mountain Lion.

Now I'm on OS X 10.8.2 on this new machine and I have two problems that seem to co-exist for a lot of other people too:

Spotlight won't index: this is f***ing infuriating, I love spotlight and I use it all the time. When I first restored from the TM backup I think the old index restored with the backup as I did get a decent number of search results (both in spotlight and in MS Outlook), but new files didn't seem to get recognised. I tried adding my hard drive to the exclusion list and removing it again in an attempt to get it to rebuild the index, but all that did was wipe the old index without building a new one, so now I get no spotlight results whatsoever. I tried this solution and sadly it hasn't worked either. Basically I can't search for anything. Even applications (which I like to launch from spotlight) don't appear. All I get is "estimating indexing time", and it never gets any further.
Time Machine won't back up: the first time I tried to backup my new machine it got a few hundred megabytes in before stalling; then a few hundred kilobytes in the next time I tried; and now it just doesn't get anywhere at all. The external drive I'm trying to backup to is recognised fine, I can see all the other files on it, and Time Machine seems to know that it's there, but the backup gets nowhere.

There are reports of this kinds of crap all over the Apple Support forums, but no definitive answer, especially for 10.8.2.

I could really do with some help on this. I need a backup before I screw another laptop, and I need spotlight to survive day-to-day life.

Thanks,

Craig

MacBook Pro, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2)

Posted on Oct 24, 2012 2:23 PM

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Answer 1

franzton

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Nov 15, 2012 7:54 AM in response to craig_mn

Hi Craig - I had the exact same problem - I'm using an old early 2009 MacBook Pro upgraded to 8 Gb Ram, 1 TB internal Hitachi HD, 10.8.2 - tried the fixes suggested - got it to work with these steps- everybodies mileage is different but hopefully it works for you as well.

a) I repaired disk permissions with Onyx (free utility) and then started up with Command-R using Disk Utility to repaired/check the Volume (harddisk checked out fine but the volume needed some minor repairs )- Onyx repair disk permission seems to go deeper -had to reinstall some apps - don't know if this solved it-seems to bring it back to the default state - you might get away with doing all from Disk Utility (but starting up with Command-R)

b) restart from my internal hd

c) downloaded the 10.8.2 combo update ( not the incremental shell update or whatever you call it which automatically gets installed with software update - combo update installs everything fresh from the .0 version)

d) with Onyx I deactivated spotlight and erased the spotlight index

d) restart

e) started TM backup - prep took pretty long 30 minutes but then 450 GB got backed up in 6 hours to my external HD which is fast enough for me

f) activated spotlight and 450 Gb were indexed in 9 hours or so

g) for 2 days everything runs fast and very responsive

best,

Franz

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