Disable Spotlight in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

Comment from mr flawless
Time: September 20, 2009, 5:01 pm

Any advantage of doing this if you have a modern decent spec mac?

Comment from CustomMac
Time: September 21, 2009, 9:07 am

Will this kill the menu bar icon too? Hope so.

Pingback from Disabling Spotlight in Snow Leopard – The Custom Mac
Time: September 21, 2009, 9:33 am

[...] Source: OSX Daily [...]

Comment from Diane Ross
Time: September 23, 2009, 8:51 pm

I turned it off, but it won’t turn back on.

sudo mdutil -a -i o
Error: unexpected indexing state (o)

When I run sudo mdutil -E /, I get Indexing disabled.

Also tried this:

sudo rm –R/.Spotlight-V100/
rm: –R/.Spotlight-V100/: No such file or directory

Comment from Richard McDonough
Time: September 24, 2009, 9:47 am

Spotlight commands do not work for me. Always disabled and everything I have done to enable spotlight has not worked. Including reinstalls of the Snow Leopard that must have had a Microsoft employee sabotaging it!

Comment from Reddddddditor
Time: September 24, 2009, 10:12 am

@Diane Ross

You are entering the command wrong, it’s

sudo mdutil -a -i on

you are entering ’sudo mdutil -a -i o’ and mdutil is not recognizing ‘o’ as an option and it’s throwing an error

anyway the above commands worked fine for me but I like Spotlight so I will keep it, thanks

Comment from Richard McDonough
Time: September 26, 2009, 9:53 am

Geting the mac to reindex using several methods, including those here and a day’s worth of calls to apple, did not work. In the end a shareware worth more than the seventeen bucks I paid for the relief of the lack of spotlight agony, called spotless 3.x worked like a dream. My find and spotlight both work and the glitch that was unglitchable by other means is fixed and the machine is working much faster. Why that last result beats me, but I am not questioning.

Comment from robertm
Time: October 5, 2009, 9:07 pm

for mr flawless, who commented:
“Any advantage of doing this if you have a modern decent spec mac?”

Well, *if it’s done right* – like this:
orion:~ robertm$ sudo su -
Password:
orion:~ root# cd /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/Metadata.framework/Support/
tar -cvf mdworkstuff.tar ./
(saves all md* to a tarball in case you ever want it back)
then :
rm mdworker
rm mdworker32
rm mds
rm mdwrite

sync;sync;reboot
(OSX reboots) ..
and everything – and I mean *everything* runs at least 30% faster:
- even Lightroom importing / rendering previews of 400 CR2 files..

Comment from machinehead
Time: October 24, 2009, 12:02 pm

robertm,

How do I undo your script above?

Thanks.

Comment from RigoR
Time: November 20, 2009, 1:52 pm

Mr. Flawless,
if you have a Dual G4 with 4GB taking care of 60TB of files it can save you from having to go to the datacenter and poweroff the box because it’s hung trying to index all that storage.

Comment from anthonyg
Time: November 27, 2009, 11:21 pm

Works to turn off Spotlight , but not to turn back on.

Comment from anthonyg
Time: November 27, 2009, 11:41 pm

Has anyone come up with a way to undo this; when I type the command that is suppose to turn “Spotlight” back on (mdutil -a -i on) as root I get “Spotlight server is disabled” as a result.

Comment from anthonyg
Time: November 29, 2009, 9:14 pm

Found a way to fix this; try the following commands for unloading and reloading the spotlight server engine:

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

if you get an error on the unload just do the load line as the service may already be off.

Comment from nate
Time: December 4, 2009, 9:23 pm

When using the command “sudo mdutil -a -i off” it turns of indexing on all drives except my backup drive (the one linked to Time Machine) – any ideas why?

Comment from Dd
Time: December 7, 2009, 4:32 pm

See polymorpheus’ post on this page for your answer as to why the “sudo mdutil” method is not the best t use:
http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=105067