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I'm working with a fresh install of Lion - including wiping the hard drive - but Spotlight refuses to be enabled. I've tried:

  • Unloading and loading the MDS service

  • The following commands:

    sudo mdutil -a -i on
sudo mdutil -i on /
sudo mdutil -E /
  • Looking for hidden "no index" files (none found)
  • Repairing disk perms
  • Checking logs for any hints as to what might be preventing Spotlight from enabling

Nothing seems to allow me to enable Spotlight on the root drive. I am continually returned:

/:   
     Indexing and searching disabled

Does anyone know what would prevent Spotlight from enabling or how to further diagnose the issue?

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Install Alfred and see if that kickstarts it somehow. You could also try Repair Permissions in Disk Utility. – Randolph West May 3 '12 at 15:29
Randolph, Alfred relies on Spotlight, so no go there. And tried disk perms too. – Matt Schultz May 3 '12 at 17:45

2 Answers

up vote 2 down vote

Solved!

The machine had its NVRAM forced to safe mode. Zapping PRAM (CMD+OPR+P+R on boot) cleared this, and it now works.

Incidentally, Lion did nothing to overtly indicate that it was booting into Safe Mode, which would've really helped in identifying and fixing the issue.

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up vote 1 down vote

Do you maybe have a /.metadata_never_index file at the root of the volume? A similar question at Ask Different: Spotlight reports "Indexing and searching disabled" in Lion.

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I checked for all hidden files; none existed. =\ – Matt Schultz May 3 '12 at 14:08
That was the issue for me, thanks. – Tony Eichelberger Apr 18 at 16:25

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