spotlight not indexing

[starmandell]

hello, ive been trying forever to get spotlight to index on leopard. ive tried numerous things and it just still doesn't work.

so the background is that i tried removing spotlight from the operating system by removing the com.apple.Spotlight.plist and com.apple.metadata.mds.plist from LaunchAgents and LaunchDaemon, respectively. I decided I wanted it back so I put them back in their correct folders and it still won't work.

I've also tried doing...

sudo nano /etc/hostconfig and making sure spotlight was set to YES
sudo mdutil -i on / but it keeps saying "unable to perform operation. no index"

sudo mdutil -E / but it also says "unable to perform operation. no index"

ive also tried putting the Machintosh HD into the privacy section of spotlight and then removing it so it would index, but it won't let me put it into there. it says "unknown error"

ive also downloaded from the apple website, a maintenance automator which runs a script to force indexing as well. but it...doesn't work either. heres the link. http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/automator/maintenance.html

yeah, i'm totally beat. could anyone please help? thank you!

[hayne]

Don't know what the problem is - maybe permissions on those files you restored?
But you always have the option of doing a reinstall of OS X.

[roncross@cox.net]

Set up an try as another user. Need to see if it's system or user related.

[ganbustein]

Check permissions. /Library/LaunchAgents, /Library/LaunchDaemons, and /System/Library/LaunchAgents, and anything they contain, must be owned by root and not writable by anyone else, not even the group.

~/Library/Launch*, and items they contain, must be owned by the user and not writable by anyone else, not even the group.

The "not writable by anyone else" part is easy to overlook, but Apple checks it scrupulously because it's a huge security hole otherwise.

The spotlight folder, /.Spotlight-V100, must be owned by root and not allow any access at all to anyone else. (It would be a huge security hole if one user could see what Spotlight has indexed from another user's files.)


Setting up as another user won't help here. Spotlight is a system function, indexing all users alike. At worst, the user-specific exclusion list as specified in System Preferences could be corrupted, but that wouldn't cause your symptoms.