I did find out the cause of my problems. Turns out the problem wasn't due to the solrconfig.xml file; it was in the schema.xml file
I spent a fair bit of time making my solrconfig closer to the default solrconfig.xml in the solr download; when that didnt get rid of the error I went back to the only other file we had that was different Turns out the line that was causing the problem was the middle line in this location_rpt fieldtype definition: <fieldType name="location_rpt" class="solr.SpatialRecursivePrefixTreeFieldType" spatialContextFactory="com.spatial4j.core.context.jts.JtsSpatialContextFactory" geo="true" distErrPct="0.025" maxDistErr="0.000009" units="degrees" /> The spatialContextFactory line caused the core to not load even tho no error/warning messages were shown. I missed that extra line somehow; mea culpa. Anyhow, I really appreciate the responses/help I got on this issue. many thanks -- View this message in context: http://lucene.472066.n3.nabble.com/Solr-4-10-2-Found-core-but-I-get-No-cores-available-in-dashboard-page-tp4173602p4174118.html Sent from the Solr - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com.