Spotlight is Wonky. Help

[Thetinguy]

Ok, so for the past few weeks spotlight has not been working. It would not find things that I had recently put on my system. So I fiddled around with it by doing this:

sh-3.2# mdutil -E /
/:
No index.

It shot me a no index error. I kept trying different things including deleting the index file through the Finder. I finally turned off spotlight with mdutil -i off /. I restarted and tried to turn it back on and it would give me this error:

sh-3.2# mdutil -i on /
/:
Error: unable to perform operation. (-100)
No index.

Then I did rm /.Spotlight-V100 and deleted the spotlight index and restarted. Now it searches for files and it has all the files in the index, but it no longer does calculator or dictionary searches. Using mdutil -E / returns this:

sh-3.2# mdutil -E /
/:
No index.

mdutil -s / returns this:

sh-3.2# mdutil -s /
/:
No index.

But I can still use spotlight to find files. Typing something into the menubar gives back accurate results without calculator or dictionary results. So what do I do to fix it without a reinstall of 10.5? This is my 2.4 ghz Santa Rosa Macbook Pro. The drive is 160 GB.

 

[Thetinguy]

I tried deleting the com.apple.spotlight.plist pref file, but that did nothing. I tried also to take out the battery and hold the power button for 10 seconds without any power, but that just broke spotlight so that it no longer finds anything.

 

[justondean]

My Fix

So...I had this problem where my spotlight would no longer do math calculations. I would type in 2+2 and nothing...random stuff in documents, but no 4. I looked around and the best answer I found was reupdate with a combo updater. I downloaded MacOSXUpdCombo10.5.6.dmg from apple downloads and reupdated. Spotlight works fine now. 2+2=4.

 

[Schtumple]

The reason Spotlight wasn't finding new items was because it probably hadn't indexed them, did you give it some time to search? Or because it didn't turn up instantly did you just assume it was broken?

In regards to deleting the spotlight index file, the free program Onyx (google it), has a bunch of maintenance scripts you can run, one of which is rebuild Spotlight index.

Finally, if spotlight is truly buggered, run "repair disk permissions" in disk utility, if that fails, you've buggered it, reinstall Leopard.