I recently ran into an error on Mac OS 10.9 about Spotlight being disabled:
mdutil[81198:507] Metadata.framework [Error]: mdsCopyStorePaths failed: (268435459) (ipc/send) invalid destination port Spotlight server is disabled.
I had turned off Spotlight indexing, so I thought that is what it meant by Spotlight being disabled. That wasn’t the case.
Fortunately fixing this error is simple, run this as root:
launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist
The I turned Spotlight indexing off again with mdutil -a -i off.
4 replies on “Mac OS X: Spotlight Server is Disabled”
That fixed an issue I ran into with SuperDuper after upgrading to Mavericks. On my machine I had to reboot after loading the LaunchDaemon again.
Thanks a lot!
Using SuperDuper after an upgrade to Mavericks is what happened to me as well. Glad to know this helped someone else.
I’ve never used SuperDuper and I have no theories why Spotlight was broken, but you guidance was the answer.
Thank you!
Thank you, this discussion helped me get my new backup drive formatted in Yosemite: Spotlight was keeping me from partitioning it and I ended up with a bit of a mess on my hands in Terminal. One of the key factors here for me was rebooting the computer after loading LaunchDaemon.