10-19-2007, 05:27 PM

When doing a search (Comm+F) on my 10.4.10 mac, I'm unable to find certain files.
It's only after I open a file & "Save As", that I can find it while doing a search.
I believe the machine needs to be indexed.
How do I do that?

10-19-2007, 05:58 PM

All the indexing takes place under the hood. This is weird. Stuff just pops up on my mac instantly after adding/deleting files...

10-19-2007, 06:07 PM

In your System Preferences, what does the Spotlight pref pane say? Are all the items ticked On? And under the Spotlight pref pane's Security tab, do you have any items in that window? If there is anything in the Security tab, that prevents Spotlight from searching the items in that list...

10-23-2007, 02:16 PM

All Spotlight items are checked.
Nothing is in Security column.

10-23-2007, 08:19 PM

Ok I think I found the solution for ya... How do I get Spotlight to reindex my hard disk?

Let us know if this works. Good luck!

10-24-2007, 01:54 PM

Tried...added Macintosh HD icon & removed, however nothing happened.
I even logged out & back in. Nada!

10-24-2007, 04:51 PM

Very odd, your problem...

If you have downloaded MainMenu (google with this spelling, if you don't have it), run all the Cleaning scripts, more importantly the User Cache and the System Cache - Deep Clean scripts, restart, then try again what I suggested earlier.

If that doesn't work...

There is an article from MacOSXHints.com where I found this comment (you'll have to use Terminal for this):

You can also do this from the command line with the mdutil command. Launch Terminal and enter:

sudo mdutil -E /
and the index file will be erased and rebuilt. The "/" stands for the boot volume; you can substitute the pathname of any volume here.

Substitute "-s" for "-E" to show if indexing is enabled on the volume, and "-i on" or "-i off" to enable or disable indexing. Note that mdutil must be run as root; hence the sudo.

You can also use mdimport to index a subset of files:

mdimport ~/Documents
would index your Documents folder and

mdimport -r /Library/Spotlight/AppleWorks.mdimporter
would index all AppleWorks files on your computer.

mdimport -L
will list all installed metadata importers.

If that doesn't work, there are other suggestions, maybe you could sort through them and use other ideas from the comments.

I really can't help with Terminal though so if you need further explanations, someone else will have to take it from here.

Keep us up to date. Good luck!