How to Force Spotlight to Reindex a Drive

Owned by Former user (Deleted)
Last updated: Mar 19, 2020 by Wayne Chen
1 min read

To reindex your root drive, follow these 5 commands.

sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/your_hard_drive_name_1 
sudo mdutil -E /Volumes/your_hard_drive_name_1 
cd / 
sudo rm -fr .Spotlight-V100 
sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/your_hard_drive_name_1

To determine the size of your Spotlight databases see https://ucsd-igpp.atlassian.net/wiki/x/mbpt