Spotlight florfed

matt neuburg wrote:
> cjcampbell <christophercampbell.RemoveThis@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Spotlight has stopped working. I tried mdutil and it returns either
> > "Could not set indexing status for volume" or "Error, no index found
> > for volume."
>
> What do you mean, "tried mdutil"? What did you actually say? For
> example, try this:
>
> sudo mdutil -s /
>

I get "Error, no index found for volume."

> What happens?
>
> > I cannot add files or volumes to the privacy list for
> > Spotlight; it simply refuses to add them. Attempting to search with
> > Finder brings up the spinner for searching but it just spins and never
> > finds anything, even with the most simple and obvious searches. I am
> > unable to locate a .Spotlight-v100 file anywhere. Deleting all caches
> > did not correct the problem. Deleting the apple.com.spotlight.plist
> > file did not fix it, either.
>
> .Spotlight-v100 is a directory, not a file.
>
> So you're saying that if you say:
>
> $ ls -al /
>
> you don't see .Spotlight-V100 near the start of the list? That's good;
> it implies that you've successfully removed the metadata index. Now use
> sudo mdutil -i on / to turn on indexing. You will have to wait for
> several hours for indexing to complete. m.
>

After sudo mdutil -i on / I get "Could not set indexing status for
volume.


>
> --
> matt neuburg, phd = matt.RemoveThis@tidbits.com, http://www.tidbits.com/matt/
> Tiger - http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/tiger-customizing.html
> AppleScript - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596102119
> Read TidBITS! It's free and smart. http://www.tidbits.com

cjcampbell <christophercampbell DeleteThis @hotmail.com> wrote:

> After sudo mdutil -i on / I get "Could not set indexing status for
> volume.

Well, beats me. I think what you'd probably want to know now is
whether the problem is the hard disk or the system. It might be
interesting to boot from an external drive and see if *it* can index
this drive. If it can, something would presumably be wrong with the
system on the internal drive. If it can't, something would presumably be
wrong with the internal drive itself. That's all I can think of... m.

--
matt neuburg, phd = matt DeleteThis @tidbits.com, http://www.tidbits.com/matt/
Tiger - http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/tiger-customizing.html
AppleScript - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596102119
Read TidBITS! It's free and smart. http://www.tidbits.com

matt neuburg wrote:
> cjcampbell <christophercampbell.DeleteThis@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> > After sudo mdutil -i on / I get "Could not set indexing status for
> > volume.
>
> Well, beats me. I think what you'd probably want to know now is
> whether the problem is the hard disk or the system. It might be
> interesting to boot from an external drive and see if *it* can index
> this drive. If it can, something would presumably be wrong with the
> system on the internal drive. If it can't, something would presumably be
> wrong with the internal drive itself. That's all I can think of... m.

Another quick way of telling if the internal drive has gone south is to
try to boot into safe mode, which I did. No go. The computer
immediately shut itself off. Diskwarrior and some other utilities could
not find anything fatally wrong with the drive, but following Apple's
instructions for diagnosing the drive eventually led to an OS X
reinstall -- and it would not. In fact, the drive would not even allow
itself to be partitioned, but SoftRAID was able to correct it well
enough for a complete reinstall. Fortunately I had an exact duplicate
of the internal volume on an external drive.

So, caution would suggest keeping this thing thoroughly backed up at
least until I get back to the USA and can replace it.