Sometimes, you may notice that Spotlight (the magnifying glass in the top right corner of the screen on a machine running OS 10.4 or newer) can’t find items on attached hard drives. If this is noticed to be occurring, you can force it to rebuild the index from scratch. This will fix most problems with Spotlight.
From the command line
- Open the Terminal from /Applications/Utilities/
- Type in: sudo mdutil -E /
-
Enter the admin password of the machine when prompted. You must do this from a local admin account.
From the system
- From the Apple menu, choose System Preferences.
- Click Spotlight.
- Click the Privacy tab.
- Drag a file, a folder, or even an entire volume (your hard drive) to the list.
- Remove the item or volume you just added.
- Spotlight will re-index the contents of the item you initially dragged to the list
Important Notes
Indexing a drive can take a long time depending on how much data is on the drive. It’s recommended that you leave the computer on overnight after forcing Spotlight to build a new index.