annie

just to let anyone know who is interested.. I have rebooted after trying the above and typed in the commands

sudo mdutil -i off /

sudo rm -rf /.Spotlight*
sudo mdutil -i on /

 after each other.

Now spotlight works and is indexing! will turn it off before the next time machine back up though

Hi there, I have exactly the same problem as ronnie.barker. !

I have only just udapted to Yosemite (10.10).

Before, I had turned spotlight off for ages because it slowed my time machine backup down.

Now I just wanted to test it and turn it on again, because the search in Mac Mail.app doesn't work - and I would need the search there now.

I tried the command

sudo mdutil -a -i off (and on)

and it came up with: 

mdutil[1766:78805] Metadata.framework [Error]: mdsCopyStorePaths failed: (268435459) (ipc/send) invalid destination port

Spotlight server is disabled.

After that I tried the command Rodger also recommended (sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist) 

and Terminal did not seem to react, the Spotlight Search still does not work or show that it is indexing - how can you check that it actually does?

After that I tried the command again and now it says: 

/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist: Operation already in progress

Does that mean it is indexing now? How do I know how long it will take?

Thanks a lot for any help in advance!