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How do I get Spotlight to reindex my hard disk?

I've been running Mac OS X Tiger for quite a while now and have only recently begun to explore the capabilities of the Spotlight feature in the OS. It's pretty cool, but sometimes I find that its index of my drive is out of date and I need to have it reindexed. How do I get Spotlight to index or reindex my drive?

Dave's Answer:

This is a great example of where Apple is too smart for its own good. Thinking about it, you would expect that option clicking on a hard drive or disk would produce a context menu that included "Index with Spotlight" or, if it had already been indexed, "Re-Index with Spotlight" as a choice. But it ain't so.

Instead, Apple recommends a fairly clunky solution:

Open Apple --> System Preferences --> Spotlight, then click on the "Privacy" tab. It'll look like this:

Now you need to drag your hard disk icon into the main area so that you indicate to Spotlight that you don't want it indexed.

Wait a few seconds and drag the disk icon back out or select it and use the "-" button to remove it.

That's all you have to do. According to Apple, that's enough that the old index will be trashed and a new one will be built. Now, to be fair, it's going to take a while to build the index so don't be surprised if the results aren't instantly available.

Hope that helps clear up one of the bigger mysteries surrounding Spotlight.

If you're getting into Spotlight, by the way, you might well want to check out a couple of cool Mac OS X extensions that make Spotlight more useful: Spotless makes it considerably easier to enable and disable Spotlight indexing, and Google Importer integrates Google search results into Spotlight results. Cool!

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Categorized: Mac OS X Help (Article 6629)
Tagged: apple spotlight, disk indexing, mac os x
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Comments

Hi Dave,

Is there a command that will do this from the terminal?

Regards

Andy

Posted by: Andy at June 23, 2006 6:51 PM

hello,
I saw the question about clearing recent searches from safari and goggle and i had another question about it. I do have safari and i have a problem in yahoo.com where i do searches from. When i put in a letter like "B" everything that starts with the letter "B" comes up, but there not nessesaraly websites, there sometimes just words like ball or ballons. How would i earase those and stop them from coming up?
thank you

Posted by: elyse at August 10, 2006 7:49 PM

I know this is an old entry, but in case someone stumbles across it, an easier way to to this is jump into the terminal and type the following command:

sudo mdutil -E /

Posted by: Brent at April 19, 2007 9:57 PM

My "search entire message" stopped working in Mac Mail. I was told that I needed to reindex my drive as described in this article. But when I drag my HD to the Spotlight Privacy window, it disappears from there and from my list of volumes in finder windows, only to reappear when I restart. Not getting anywhere. I have already repaired permissions. OS 10.4.9 Dual-Core Intel 2GB 667 MHz. Thanks for anyhelp.

Posted by: Dick Feldman at May 30, 2007 7:31 AM

Hi, I have a problem with spotlight after upgrade to leopard, I used your information but the problem still here, then I found the answer, go to Terminal, "su root", ..., and then "mdutil -i on /" for Turn indexing on in the root Volumen, for "Turn indexing on" in the root Volumen. no more.

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