Force Spotlight to reindex drive

[kuebby]

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Ok, so lately it seems that spotlight is missing things, iCal events, address book entries, etc. So I'd like to force it to just reindex my internal hard drive, how can I accomplish this?

 

[wrldwzrd89]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A102 Safari/419.3)

Ok, so lately it seems that spotlight is missing things, iCal events, address book entries, etc. So I'd like to force it to just reindex my internal hard drive, how can I accomplish this?

The simplest way I know of to accomplish this is to open up System Preferences, add your drive to the list of things not to index, close System Preferences, reopen it, remove your drive, and close System Preferences again.

 

[brand]

In terminal type

sudo mdutil -E /

 

[jman995x]

In terminal type

sudo mdutil -E /

Question from a Noob....I have an external HDD with 1,000's of mp3's on it.
I was listening to some songs yesterday (on the HDD), so I know they are there.
Today, I went to Spotlight and looked for some of the songs I listened to yesterday and Spotlight doesn't find SOME of them.
When I navigate to the folder and song myself....ta da, there are the songs....but Spotlight doesn't see them when it's searching.

So, what am I missing, and what do I need to do in order to get Spotlight back on track?

Do I need to reindex that external drive, and if so, what is the terminal code for doing that?

Thanks,

Justin

 

[dilbert4life]

Holy thread resurrection, Batman!

Question from a Noob....I have an external HDD with 1,000's of mp3's on it.
I was listening to some songs yesterday (on the HDD), so I know they are there.
Today, I went to Spotlight and looked for some of the songs I listened to yesterday and Spotlight doesn't find SOME of them.
When I navigate to the folder and song myself....ta da, there are the songs....but Spotlight doesn't see them when it's searching.

So, what am I missing, and what do I need to do in order to get Spotlight back on track?

Do I need to reindex that external drive, and if so, what is the terminal code for doing that?

Thanks,

Justin

Yes, you do need to reindex the external drive. The code for doing that is

sudo mdutil -E [DRAG_VOLUME_HERE_FROM_FINDER]

It will ask you for your users password. Enter it and then it should star doing its thing. If you get an error, enter this instead

sudo mdutil -i off [DRAG_VOLUME_HERE_FROM_FINDER] ; sudo mdutil -i on [DRAG_VOLUME_HERE_FROM_FINDER]

That will turn the indexing off for your drive, and then back on, at which point Spotlight will reindex it.

Let me know if that works out for ya.

 

[macmaster24]

Yes, you do need to reindex the external drive. The code for doing that is

sudo mdutil -E [DRAG_VOLUME_HERE_FROM_FINDER]

It will ask you for your users password. Enter it and then it should star doing its thing. If you get an error, enter this instead

sudo mdutil -i off [DRAG_VOLUME_HERE_FROM_FINDER] ; sudo mdutil -i on [DRAG_VOLUME_HERE_FROM_FINDER]

That will turn the indexing off for your drive, and then back on, at which point Spotlight will reindex it.

Let me know if that works out for ya.

Will this work, or will it like delete my hard drive or something?

 

[GGJstudios]

Will this work, or will it like delete my hard drive or something?

Here's a simple method: Spotlight: How to re-index folders or volumes

 

[canadianpj]

Here's a simple method: Spotlight: How to re-index folders or volumes

Thank you. This is the best option, easy to do.