Oscar Ruitt
Registered
I'm running Leopard 10.5.6 on a PowerBook G4. I installed Leopard about five days ago, from Tiger. (Possibly relevant: I was evaluating Together when I discovered this problem. Together is an information manager which uses Spotlight for its own indexing.) I don't know if this problem existed before installing Together, since I had only 3-4 days of use and I don't think I tried a Contents search before. (I really don't think it's Together, but it's _something_.)
Spotlight does not return _any_ results when asked to search for _any_ word. This is when setting the menu selections to "Contents" and entering any word in the text field. The number of items found is "0 items" and the list is empty. When typing, if I look very quickly, I can see, as I enter each keystroke of the search word, the text "Searching this Mac" displayed _very_ briefly. It is as if Spotlight is instantly searching for each word fragment as I type (as it normally does) but returning 0 results instantly, before having time to even look at its index.
The problem exists whether I have external drives connected or not.
All other Spotlight searches work normally--searching by name, date modified, type, etc.
So I forced re-indexing. (What else does one do with Spotlight problems) by dragging the boot volume into the Privacy list of the Spotlight preference pane and then deleting it. The process mds ran for less than five minutes and then quit, as though it was done. I THINK THIS IS IMPORTANT. How could it have indexed the disk (which has lots of stuff on it) in less than five minutes? Five minutes sounds like about the amount of time Spotlight would use if it was indexing everything _except_ contents.
I had an Apple Genius look into this and his solution was to use File Buddy (!). He used Terminal to force re-indexing with the same results--five minutes of mds and nothing else and no fix. The Genius also booted from an external volume with Leopard on it and the results were the same (on my disk). We copied a few files from my disk to his disk and copies on his disk _were_ indexed by Contents.
I'm getting the feeling that Spotlight is not creating a Contents index at all. So when asked to search by Contents, of course it responds instantly (nothing to search) and returns zero results.
It's as if there is a global setting or hidden preference that is (mis-)set telling Spotlight to not index contents.
Obviously this is a big problem for me. I have a feeling that re-installing the OS won't work either, since booting from the Genius's volume didn't fix the problem.
Oscar
Spotlight does not return _any_ results when asked to search for _any_ word. This is when setting the menu selections to "Contents" and entering any word in the text field. The number of items found is "0 items" and the list is empty. When typing, if I look very quickly, I can see, as I enter each keystroke of the search word, the text "Searching this Mac" displayed _very_ briefly. It is as if Spotlight is instantly searching for each word fragment as I type (as it normally does) but returning 0 results instantly, before having time to even look at its index.
The problem exists whether I have external drives connected or not.
All other Spotlight searches work normally--searching by name, date modified, type, etc.
So I forced re-indexing. (What else does one do with Spotlight problems) by dragging the boot volume into the Privacy list of the Spotlight preference pane and then deleting it. The process mds ran for less than five minutes and then quit, as though it was done. I THINK THIS IS IMPORTANT. How could it have indexed the disk (which has lots of stuff on it) in less than five minutes? Five minutes sounds like about the amount of time Spotlight would use if it was indexing everything _except_ contents.
I had an Apple Genius look into this and his solution was to use File Buddy (!). He used Terminal to force re-indexing with the same results--five minutes of mds and nothing else and no fix. The Genius also booted from an external volume with Leopard on it and the results were the same (on my disk). We copied a few files from my disk to his disk and copies on his disk _were_ indexed by Contents.
I'm getting the feeling that Spotlight is not creating a Contents index at all. So when asked to search by Contents, of course it responds instantly (nothing to search) and returns zero results.
It's as if there is a global setting or hidden preference that is (mis-)set telling Spotlight to not index contents.
Obviously this is a big problem for me. I have a feeling that re-installing the OS won't work either, since booting from the Genius's volume didn't fix the problem.
Oscar