Rebuild the Spotlight Index
Do you need to rebuild the entire Spotlight index on a Mac? It’s easy to do, but can take a while. Here’s how to start the reindexing process of an entire drive using the Spotlight control panel:
- Launch System Preferences from the Apple menu
- Click on “Spotlight” and then click on the “Privacy” tab
- Drag Macintosh HD (and other drives if necessary) into this window
- Click “OK” when asked to confirm
- Now select the drive(s) you just added and click the “-” minus button to remove it from the list
Note: if an item is left under the “Privacy” list, it will exclude from Spotlight indexing completely.
Spotlight will immediately begin to reindex the drive(s) you added and then removed from the Privacy list. How long it takes to reindex the drive varies, ranging from 30 minutes to several hours, depending on the speed of the drive and it’s contents. At any point, you can pull down the Spotlight menu and check the progress:
The Mac will probably feel sluggish during reindexing as the mdworker and mds processes run and consume a lot of CPU and cause a lot of disk activity.
Rebuilding and reindexing Spotlight is an excellent troubleshooting technique when you encounter problems with the Mac search client. If you find Spotlight isn’t working at all, try some of these other troubleshooting tips too.
sudo mdutil -E / works as well
You sure that works for OS X Lion?
Yes. Just did it.
[...] the Spotlight index for one reason or another, you may need to reindex the drive manually. This is easy from the Spotlight control panel, and can also be achieved through the command line as we’ll [...]
I receive this message when trying to reindex.
Privacy List Error:
The item couldn’t be added or removed because of an unknown error.
Brad, I had the same error message… The item couldn’t be added or removed because of an unknown error. I have nothing in the spotlight privacy box.
I am getting the same error message “The item couldn’t be added or removed because of an unknown error”. I am using a Macbook Air 1.7GHz core i5, 4GB with Outlook 2011.
I added and removed and literally nothing changed…
spotlight did not start to re-index at all
Same here. 10.8, didn’t do a thing.
[...] slow down a Mac. This is typically worse after reboots between major file system changes when the index is rebuilt, a major system update, or when another hard drive full of stuff is connected to the Mac. Typically [...]
You have to add it to the list, close the window, come back to it and remove it. It will work at that time.
The method illustrated on the top of this page is also what I was told to do at genius bar, but am unable to drag hard drive into the privacy tab window. When I drag it to window, no icon appears, although the + sign appears when I drag it. Am I doing something wrong?
Make sure you drag the icon and then DROP it into the Privacy tab window, so that the + sign goes away and is replaced by the drive icon.
This didnt work…