Leopard's Spotlight Problem

Since the past month I've been using the new, and for many people troublesome Apple OS X 10.5 Leopard. Besides having some annoyances with Spaces, I main concern has been Spotlight. It simply does not work. It didn't seem to index anything on my machine. I did check the privacy settings and nothing seemed wrong.

Today I stumbled on a little commandline tool called mdutil which is a utility to manage Spotlight indexes. So if you've got the same problem, you might want to try what I did. Open a Terminal window and type:

sudo mdutil -v -i on /

Immidiatly I heard the lovely sound of my harddrive chewing on as it got indexed. Sweet!

10 comments made for “Leopard's Spotlight Problem”

DECEMBER 29TH, 2007
By: Shep

Hmm... I tried this and I get:

/:
Error: unable to perform operation. (-107)
No index.

Any suggestions?

JANUARY 16TH, 2008
By: dykstra

ur great. cheers, i worked like a charm for me!

JANUARY 17TH, 2008
By: Mattias

Thanks dykstra.
Shep, I'm sorry, I don't know what that means. you might want to have a look in this Apple discussion board: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6011731

MARCH 4TH, 2008
By: jack koh

Try Archive and Install. This fixed my problem.

JUNE 18TH, 2008
By: Karen

Thanks! I finally got it to work by doing this:
bash-3.2$ su -
Password:
LeopardServer13:~ root# mdutil -i on /
/:
Indexing enabled.
LeopardServer13:~ root#

FEBRUARY 18TH, 2009
By: Jose Turcios

It works..!!

Thank You

FEBRUARY 18TH, 2009
By: Jose Turcios

sudo mdutil -v -i on /

It works..!!

Thank You

SEPTEMBER 8TH, 2009
By: Al Froese

When I go to the Terminal Window and type in
sudo mdutil -v -i on /
It requires a password and it will not let me type in anything in the password field.

Help and Thanks

DECEMBER 13TH, 2009
By: esther carney

you don't see the password like you do in other GUI but it still goes in.. just hit return and all should work.

FEBRUARY 2ND, 2011
By: Jason

YES! Apple support wanted me to erase and reinstall my OSX. I searched nearly two dozen sites and nothing worked. Your tip has my index up and running again. I cannot thank you enough for posting this.

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