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No results in Finder/Spotlight (10.6.5)??

Megadooomer

Megadooomer

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 3, 2009
23
0
NJ (dreams of NYC)
Hi,
Finder and Spotlight on my 10.6.5 Macbook are no longer returning results. Even within folders, querying ".pdf", for example returns no hits. Smart-folders with 'file kind' parameters also remain empty. How do I fix this?



PS I have tried to find an answer using the MR "search forums" function, but can't figure out how to correctly enter the query to give specific results, (for example, it just returns lots of threads with "results" rather than "no results".
 
First step is to try rebuilding the Spotlight index. Open System Preferences -> Spotlight, click the Privacy tab, and drag your hard drive onto the list. Close System Preferences, then reopen it and remove the hard drive from the list. If you click the Spotlight icon in the menubar, you'll see it says indexing. Let it run, then try searching again once it's finished indexing. It could be that it simply has a bad index and so doesn't recognize any files.

Let us know if that works or doesn't work!

jW
 
excellent, thank you, your advice appears to have fixed much or all of the problem. I did not see the "rebuilding" dialogue you mentioned, but searches now return hits within pdfs, etc. I may try a clean install later due to other odd system behaviors, so I suspect that may fix some of the hangs and other odd issues that persist within Finder!
 
Mal said:
First step is to try rebuilding the Spotlight index. Open System Preferences -> Spotlight, click the Privacy tab, and drag your hard drive onto the list. Close System Preferences, then reopen it and remove the hard drive from the list. If you click the Spotlight icon in the menubar, you'll see it says indexing. Let it run, then try searching again once it's finished indexing. It could be that it simply has a bad index and so doesn't recognize any files.

Let us know if that works or doesn't work!

jW
Click to expand...

Your suggestion seems to have worked. Thanks..!
 
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