Apple - Spotlight reports "Indexing and searching disabled" in Lion

I had the exact same problem, with all solutions above failing identically. Then I reexamined the directory listing for / and found a hidden file .metadata_never_index in the root directory. I removed this file and was able to turn spotlight on again with mdutil -i on /.

mds is now reindexing the hard disk, all looks good for now.

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

1 - turn indexing off

2 - delete Spotlight folder

3 - turn indexing on

4 - rebuild

Does this help?

Also it seems you could use these commands:

sudo mdutil -a -i off
sudo mdutil -a -i on

The other solutions didn't work for me, however the following was the culprit in my case.

Make sure your root/main hard drive isn't in the "privacy" settings for spotlight. For some reason I had the whole hard drive under the "Prevent spotlight from indexing the following locations" list.

You can access this section from System Preferences -> Spotlight -> Privacy