- It was possible to enter search term but did not show anything other than Web or Wikipedia.
- In preferences it was set to show all and the privacy pane was empty.
- In terminal (terminal commands in blue, terminal response in red)
"sudo mdutil -i off /" (to turn off service),
"sudo mdutil -i on /", (to turn on service)
"sudo mdutil -E /" (to delete meta data)
all produced the result 'Spotlight Server is disabled' i.e. the usual command seem to have no effect.
The following terminal command seemed to produce some results, time will tell if it is temporary
- "sudo rm -rf /.Spotlight-V100" removed the index but had no effect on above commands
- "sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist " produced 'com.apple.metadata.mds Already loaded'
- "sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist" seemed to work.
- "sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist" then seemed to work also [using the reverse has also been required i.e unload load unload and then reload]
- Restarting Spotlight then with "sudo mdutil -i on /" produced \
/: Indexing enabled.
/Volumes/MacDell435TMBU: Indexing enabled
There are multiple descriptions of problems with Spotlight and it is unlikely there is one common cause but a number do describe the issue of the Server disabled command when usual terminal commands are used trying to reset it. This may help in some circumstances.
