Spotlight problems

P

pejota

Registered
Hi

I was playing/ exploring my MAc (PBG4) , specially trying to change the short name of the user, and after re-starting the system, the desktop picture dissapeared, and it seems that the spotlight it´s not working properly.
Even if you look for something that is in the desktop, it can not find it, and is giving very bizzards results.

Any suggestions is more than welcome
Thanks in advance

Pedro-Jose
 
you changed the short name.

this is one of the fundamentals of the system (and shouldn't be so easily editable).

what has happened is that when you changed your shortname and then restarted, mac os was loading and searching for your Home folder. it couldn't find any home folder matching the shortname. So it created new ones, like if the computer was new. go into your main hard drive (on the desktop), and in the main drive, click on the folder 'users'. in it will be the current home folder, with the House icon on it. this will bear your new shortname. also in this folder will be a normal folder with your old shortname on it. this is where all yoiur old desktop settings are.

spotlight doesn't work becuase it doesn't know what it's searching, it's probably indexing the hard drive, trying to find out whats there again now it;s been reset. it's start working again in about 3-4 hours, once it's finished.

you are seeing the basic visual effects of changing the shortname, but it is actually quite fundamental, and may cause your computer to become 'unstable'.

to fix this, unfortunately you are going to have to change your shortname back to what it was (no matter how silly it looks), by ctrl-clicking on your home folder in Finder and selecting 'rename [ ]....' and making sure you type the shortname exactly how it was.

restart.

it should find the old shortname useful, and connect it with your old home folder, and load the correct settings.
 
Thank for your help. Actually, as soon as I realice the changes in the desktop, I put everything as it was before, (my old short name in the House icon, actually the system did it), so in the users folders is just my Home Icon, and the share folder that is empty, and this was nearly 3-4 days ago.

I just thought that the old folders are in the bin, and that could explain that the spotlight is not working, so I empty that and see waht happen

Any advice?
Thanks again
 
You can try going to spotlight preference setting, under privacy tab select add your hard drive. Essentially, you are telling spotlight to ignore your HD. Then just undo the previous action, making spotlight re-index your HD. Spotlight will be unavailable for several minutes, while it is indexing, you can check this by trying to use spotlight.
 
Ceterum censeo Apple should somehow disable people from messing with the home folder names in the Finder... Reminds me of Rhapsody DR 2, when you could choose "/" in the Workspace Manager (NeXT's "Finder") and hit the delete button, and without further ado, your whole file system and attached media were erased. As in: "Well, you _told_ me to erase it..." - Certainly not good for the average home user. ;)
 
i deleted 15gb of music for good, most of which wasn't backed up, as i dropped a folder of about 5 songs into my itunes folder. unlike windows which merges, MacOS replaces.

that hurt, a lot.

"but you *told* me to replace that folder!"
 
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