[SteveJobs]

Hello,

I'm using Spotlight on a PowerBook G4 with the latest OS X version. Somehow, searching for some files gives no results - although the files definitely exist and although I searched only for the title. I also tried a specified research only in that folder, without results.

How can this be? An indexing problem perhaps? I was told the data in discussion was moved later on from an external hard drive onto the interal drive. Perhaps this is part of the problem.

Thanks in advance for any help!

Greetings,
Steve

[Big Mac]

Spotlight, at least in Panther, is only partially baked. The behavior you're seeing is not abnormal, unfortunately. There are ways to improve the results a bit - such as by forcing Spotlight to index whatever area of your drive you're looking for - but in the end while Spotlight is nice it's a bit of a crapshoot.

[TETENAL]

Put your drive into the Spotlight Privacy, wait a moment and the put it out again. Spotlight will then re-index everything and then probably find your files.

[steve626]

Originally Posted by SteveJobs

Hello,

I'm using Spotlight on a PowerBook G4 with the latest OS X version. Somehow, searching for some files gives no results - although the files definitely exist and although I searched only for the title. I also tried a specified research only in that folder, without results.

How can this be? An indexing problem perhaps? I was told the data in discussion was moved later on from an external hard drive onto the interal drive. Perhaps this is part of the problem.

Thanks in advance for any help!

Greetings,
Steve

Spotlight does not search in certain folders, such as the /private folders and folders inside of it, since those are normally "invisible" folders and files. As long as your nightly and weekly and monthly maintenance tasks are run regularly on your Mac, you can go to terminal and type

locate daily.out

for instance and the file daily.out will be found. Try this in spotlight and it won't find it. Other examples of such files spotlight won't find for you include secure.log, weekly.out, monthly.out, system.log and so forth.

If, on the other hand, you aren't finding ordinary visible files that you can simply see by simple inspection, and the problem is that spotlight doesn't see them, then you have a spotlight problem that the other replies may help you resolve.

[brokenjago]

Originally Posted by BigMac

Spotlight, at least in Panther

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Spotlight isn't in Panther.