Comments on: Spotlight won’t work? Fix a broken Spotlight menu with these troubleshooting tips

By: Srini

Srini — Sat, 12 May 2012 03:32:23 +0000

Spot on. Font cache cleared the problem. Thanks a million!

By: sandy

sandy — Sat, 05 May 2012 07:44:47 +0000

Maintenance software did it perfectly ! iit was easy to use and worked instantly. onyx is too complicated

By: Sam

Sam — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 14:44:19 +0000

Will those work for a spotlight that freezes and won’t stop searching, doesn’t close out when the mouse isn’t on it. and when the mouse is on it it shows the spinning wheel?

By: After restoring fresh HDD from Time Machine Backup: No results from Spotlight « The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of Wiert stuff

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 05:02:15 +0000

[...] I tried various tips all having to do with erasing Spotlight for my root volume (so it would be automatically be reindexed), or many-part steps including killing SystemUIServer, Clearing Caches and Rebooting. [...]

By: Philinda

Philinda — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 02:36:22 +0000

Damn, I wish I could think of somethnig smart like that!

By: Barry Nisan

Barry Nisan — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 18:05:22 +0000

Thanks for the tip regarding removing the mail from spotlight search… looks like it’s working just fine now for me so far (last 2 days). I called Apple before checking this site, and they also told me they never heard of this problem, so I was under the impression I was the only one and got a bad batch, but I think this seems to be a common issue.

By: James Ludtke

James Ludtke — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 05:09:40 +0000

Off and on, I have been spending hours and hours over the last year to get Spotlight to work properly. Spotlight seamed to work, but produced search results which were ludicrous. Re-indexing, cache clearing, deleting pref file, deleting index files, turning Spotlight off and on, nothing made a difference.

When I did a sudo nano /etc/hostconfig, I found there was no entry for “SPOTLIGHT” at all. I entered SPOTLIGHT=-YES- and saved. Problem gone.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

By: gosling

gosling — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 12:22:54 +0000

thanks a lot

By: Ian Johnston

Ian Johnston — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 08:55:51 +0000

Patrick – thank you very much for your input here. None of the fixes in the article worked for me until I read your reply and tried the simple (at least it’s simple when you know about it!!) act of turning indexing on in Terminal. No idea how it got switched off in the first place, but all now working – thank you very much for sharing your knowledge.

Ian

By: Ian Johnston

Ian Johnston — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 08:54:45 +0000

Ian

By: Bernard Francois

Bernard Francois — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 14:03:02 +0000

My spotlight got ‘stuck’ while searching, showing a ‘spinning beach ball of death’ while hovering the menu.

The first solution (ending the SystemUIServer using the Activity Monitor tool) did the job.

Thanks!

By: Fiona

Fiona — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 15:56:18 +0000

I’ve tried #Solution 4 and downloaded Main Menu. I followed the instructions and not my computer plays the reboots chord, brings up the Apple Logo (but no little wheel-of-death), holds on for ten minutes or so then fades to black, and restarts the whole process

this is a disaster

By: Allan

Allan — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 16:48:06 +0000

Thank you Bruce! Executing “sudo mdutil -E /” responded with “No index”. But your solution to enable indexing worked!
To summarize, in Terminal execute:

sudo nano /etc/hostconfig
(Make sure you have SPOTLIGHT=-YES- in there…..and not SPOTLIGHT=-NO- )

then to turn on indexing:
sudo mdutil -i on /
(it replied: Indexing enabled)

Then when I check Spotlight, I can see that it has begun indexing.

By: Adam

Adam — Thu, 05 May 2011 09:23:11 +0000

I’m pretty sure #2 is the one for me, but when I type in the command it says “Indexing and searching disabled” and then doesn’t begin to index.

What do I do??

By: Holly

Holly — Sun, 01 May 2011 18:41:52 +0000

Solution #1 worked for a day, then Spotlight stopped working again. So, I tried #2 but instead of rebuilding the index it now tells me ” Indexing and searching disabled.” Now what do I do?