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T'hain Esh Kelch

macrumors 604
Original poster
Aug 5, 2001
6,529
7,500
Denmark
I have a '09 Macbook running 10.11.6, with Spotlight acting up.

Bringing up Spotlight with command-Space, and writing anything, only results in the first 2-4 characters being written, after which the Spotlight dialog freezes with the eternal wheel of doom showing up. Only solution is to kill the Spotlight process itself, after which you can repeat the problem if you wish.

I tried reindexing the Spotlight database using "sudo mdutil -E /", but surprisingly it only took it ~3 seconds to finish, which I found quite strange.

Any suggestions? My current last resort is to reinstall the system.
 
I tried reindexing the Spotlight database using "sudo mdutil -E /", but surprisingly it only took it ~3 seconds to finish
Yeah... that is odd. How about try a command-r boot to recovery then run Disk Utility First Aid on the disk to see if it finds anything wrong.
 
Use "EasyFind" and "Find Any File" instead.

Better than Spotlight.
 
Yeah... that is odd. How about try a command-r boot to recovery then run Disk Utility First Aid on the disk to see if it finds anything wrong.
I tried that, and it found no errors.

By inspiration from another thread, I deleted com.apple.Spotlight.plist and that seems to have worked, fortunately!

Use "EasyFind" and "Find Any File" instead.

Better than Spotlight.
Which doesn't solve my problem.
 
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