MacOS – Spotlight reports “Indexing and searching disabled” in Lion

macosspotlight

Lion keeps "losing track" of Spotlight information. Directories and Applications disappear, full text searches stop working, etc. I seem to need to re-index it once a week or so.

However, now it appears to not work at all.

Running

sudo mdutil -i on /

from the Terminal I get a message

"Indexing and searching disabled."

I have tried trashing preference files, deleting the whole V100 folder, repairing permssions, etc but Spotlight still thinks indexing is turned off on my entire Volume (Yes have added/deleted whole disk from Spotlight's privacy preferences").

In the console I have quite a few errors that look like this

mds: (Error) Server: Disabled store registered for scope "/Applications"

However, I do not know how to tell it to re-enable that scope as mdutil gives an error when I try to turn on indexing and gives an error when I try to delete the index

EDIT: I reinstalled Lion. It did not fix the problem(s) 🙁

Best Answer

I had the exact same problem, with all solutions above failing identically. Then I reexamined the directory listing for / and found a hidden file .metadata_never_index in the root directory. I removed this file and was able to turn spotlight on again with mdutil -i on /.

mds is now reindexing the hard disk, all looks good for now.

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There a command line tool which you could use: mdutil. Open Terminal.app application and try the following:

To check the indexing status (on|off) for a volume:

thomas$ mdutil -s /Volumes/nfs-spotlight/
/Volumes/nfs-spotlight:
    Indexing enabled.

...and to turn indexing off:

thomas$ sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/nfs-spotlight/
Password:
/Volumes/nfs-spotlight:
    Indexing disabled.

...or even better disable spotlight activities:

thomas$ sudo mdutil -d /Volumes/nfs-spotlight/
/Volumes/nfs-spotlight:
    Indexing and searching disabled.

Calling mdutil without any parameter shows all the allowed parameters

It works with my NAS nfs mount but then it's much smaller than 100TB. It's worth a try nevertheless.

MacOS – Spotlight “Indexing and searching disabled.” message in terminal on OSX. Why

FINALLY!! I got it working again!

Heres what I did:

In terminal I ran:

locate .metadata_never_index

No database existed, so it prompted me to run:

sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.locate.plist

It ran for a few seconds and I retried the locate command.. it found it in my root. I deleted it and tried turning on spotlight again, but still got the "indexing and searching disabled."

I checked the permissions of my SSD and my account wasn't even listed. I added myself to read/write. Then ran:

sudo mdutil -i on /

terminal returned "Indexing enabled."

Lastly.. I went to system preferences>spotlight>privacy.. dragged my SSD then removed it to reindex. 40 minutes later.. everything is back to normal! It had been a year since spotlight worked on my MBP. Ohhh the struggles I faced trying to find emails/files.

Thanks for the tips and suggestions everyone and Google!

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Spotlight, infinite indexing, secondary drives, and NAS

MacOS – Spotlight “Indexing and searching disabled.” message in terminal on OSX. Why

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