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!
I search for it in the net for months... and it was so easy!!
System preferences -spotilight -Privacy -if your harddisk is in the list mark it and then press (-)
When your harddisk is removed from "prevent searching this locations", you spotilight will scan your files for around 2 hours and voila!
:)
Re-index an entire drive In the Terminal, type sudo mdutil -E / and hit return. You may have to enter your password. The existing Spotlight index will be deleted, and Spotlight will start creating a new index in the background. You can re-index other hard drives by changing the command to include their name, like sudo mdutil -E /Volumes/OtherHardDrive.
sudo mdutil -i off /
sudo rm -rf /.Spotlight*
sudo mdutil -i on /
sudo mdutil -E /
I'm order, these accomplish:
- turn indexing off
- delete Spotlight folder
- turn indexing on
- rebuild
I just recently ran into this issue with needing to reindex my external drive in order for Spotlight and/or HoudahSpot to search files accordingly., albeit, I'm still not pulling back archives i.e., .rar, .zip, .gzip
For me, running:
sudo mdutil -a -i on
Automatically enabled and re-indexed all drives.
When I attempted to enable indexing on an external drive explicitly, I see the following:
sudo mdutil -E /Volumes/EXTERNAL_DRIVE
/Volumes/EXTERNAL_DRIVE:
2021-02-25 10:26:51.123 mdutil[5421:1461549] mdutil disabling Spotlight: /Volumes/EXTERNAL_DRIVE -> kMDConfigSearchLevelFSSearchOnly
Indexing disabled.
Only after running sudo mdutil -a -i on was I then able to find (/var/db/locate.database) after re-indexing completed as the accepted answer suggests.
For some reason, sudo mdutil -E /Volumes/EXTERNAL_DRIVE, which should erase and rebuild the index doesn't work as expected.
HTH