osx86 Island

Spotlight search in entourage sometimes stops working, and no matter what ‘rebuild’ options you choose inside entourage, the search just won’t cooperate.

A year ago I had this problem and struggled to fix it, now, a year later I had the problem again, but forgot how I fixed it.  After struggling for a bit, I remembered what I had done before.

This may not be the case for everyone, but for me, the problem wasn’t because of entourage, it was because of OSX’s own spotlight database.  I had manually done it via terminal before (deleted old stuff and rebuilt new spotlight database), but this time I tried a little app called “Maintenance” (v 3.8 at the time of this writeup).  I simply chose the rebuild spotlight index option, and ran it.  A couple seconds later it gave me a notice that it had completed, then, if you click the spotlight button up on the top-right-hand-side of your mac, you’ll notice it shows that the database is rebuilding.  I went to lunch, came back, and it had completed.

I performed a search in entourage, and, much to my satisfaction, everything worked again.

The download link to this utility is here:

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/automator/maintenance.html

I hope this helps someone else out there, as it managed to frustrate me twice now.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 6th, 2010 at 10:04 am and is filed under Uncategorized . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.