Since yesterday all kinds of searches either return nothing or very few results. This also happens on a number of external drives. I have rebuilt the Spotlight index sveral times, but it makes no difference. This is very untimely since I need to search for tons of files to finish an important project, preferably yesterday. All help is greatly appreciated!
Safe Boot from the HD, (holding Shift key down at bootup), does the problem occur in Safe Mode?
Safe mode attempts to repair Disks & clears lots of caches, so if Safe Mode works try again in regular boot.
I've used this for years to really find stuff...
Find Any File...
http://apps.tempel.org/FindAnyFile/index.php
Hold Option or alt key when selecting Find to Find All.
OOPs, you mistakenly marked it solved. :(
Manually Rebuilding Spotlight via Terminal
If the aforementioned Spotlight control panel approach doesn’t spur a reindexation of the drive, you may need to initiate it manually through the command line. Open Terminal and use the following command string to do so:
sudo mdutil -E /
This basically asks for temporary super user status, which is why Terminal may ask you for your password (it may not if you’ve used a sudo command recently or are already logged in as a super user or root. The command asks the unix tool mdutil to reindex the spotlight database for everything on the computer, including external drives, mounted disk images, etc. To re-index only for a specific drive, use the /Volumes path. For example, for an external drive named “MiniMe,” the command would look like this:
sudo mdutil -i on /
Rebuilding a drive index can take a long time, so be prepared to wait whether you do it through the System Preference panel or the command line.
Thanks, but it made no difference.
Search in Finder/Spotlight etc doesn't work
