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asus389

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Sep 11, 2019
341
236
USA
Sometime in the past week I noticed that spotlight on my Mac wasn't finding anything in /Applications. I have a 2017 MBP 13 inch and I have two bootable volumes, one with Mac OS 10.15.7 Catalina and one with Mac OS 13.2 Ventura. Oddly enough, this problem effects both OS when booted.

I've tried all of the normal spotlight troubleshooting that I can think of:

- Added and removed the volume from Spotlight/Privacy in system preferences.
- Ran sudo mdutil -E / at the terminal
- Disabling/enabled spotlight with sudo mdutil -a -i off/sudo mdutil -a -i on
- All of the boxes are checked in the search results tab in the Spotlight preference pane.
- Unchecking and then re-checking /Applications doesn't appear to have done anything.

Does anyone have any suggestions? It's unclear why spotlight would suddenly do this. I'd like to avoid a re-install if possible...

sudo mdutil -sav /
/:

Indexing enabled.

Scan base time: 2023-02-03 13:07:12 +0000 (24067 seconds ago), reasoning: '(null)'

/System/Volumes/Data:

Indexing enabled.
 

macsound1

macrumors 6502a
May 17, 2007
835
864
SF Bay Area
would you mind doing a spotlight search for any built in app and show us a screenshot? Disk utility, terminal, Activity monitor. Nothing too deep
 
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asus389

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Sep 11, 2019
341
236
USA
Huh, weird. This issue seems to only effect 3rd party apps and Safari? All other pre-install OS X apps come up fine in spotlight.

Screen Shot 2023-02-03 at 2.57.50 PM.png
 
Last edited:
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asus389

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Sep 11, 2019
341
236
USA
Hmmm now its doing this?

sudo mdutil -sav /

/:

Error: unexpected indexing state. kMDConfigSearchLevelTransitioning

/System/Volumes/Data:

Error: unexpected indexing state. kMDConfigSearchLevelTransitioning
 

asus389

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Sep 11, 2019
341
236
USA
So it looks like mds_stores is repeatedly crashing. This message keeps showing up in the console:

Crashed thread: 5 Dispatch queue: com.apple.metadata.spotlightindex.Utility Index Query scheduler for index at /System/Volumes/Data/private/var/db/Spotlight-V100
 

asus389

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Sep 11, 2019
341
236
USA
No, sadly. I just switched to using the Venutra partition that I had on the same machine. I suspect a re-install would have solved it. No amount of deleting/rebuilding/re-enabling spotlight on my Catalina seemed to fix it.
 
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