Enable Spotlight Indexing To Re-Index Your Mac Hard Drive [OS X Tips]

A while back, we wrote up a tip on reindexing the hard drive on your Mac using Terminal. Recently, a Cult of Mac reader emailed us to let us know it wasn’t quite working on his end.

Rob,
I read your post on using terminal to reindex the hard drive on a mac. Any idea why when the command is executed the terminal displays “Indexing disabled.”?

Thanks,
Mike S

Here’s what he had to do to get it working again.

It turns out that Mike may have disabled Spotlight Indexing at some point, or it was disabled for some other reason. He had to enable, or re-enable, really, the indexing process. To do that, launch Terminal and type or paste in the following command:

sudo mdutil -a -i on

Hit return and then enter your admin password. This will get the indexing working again. Now when you go to re-index spotlight in the future, you won’t get the error that Mike saw, above, and you’ll be able to save a bit of time once the re-indexing has happened.

• Via Mike Hudson Blog

Comment »