MacBook :: Spotlight In Snow Leopard Won't Stop Indexing
Oct 27, 2009
I've had Snow Leopard since the day it came out. And I installed it that same day. Since then Spotlight is constantly indexing and will not stop. I noticed about a week after installation when I went to use stoplight and it wouldn't let me because it was indexing. Now fast forward to today I still haven't fixed this problem because I never really needed to use it. So no I have the need, and I need to fix this problem. BTW I'm using a 13" aluminum Mac Book bought around June '09 the model right before the current 13" aluminum Mac Book Pro's
Spotlight has been indexing for four days now,; all it says is 'estimating indexing time.' Meanwhile, i can't search for anythign on my hard drive. how can i make it stop?
I use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my internal HD to my External 3 times a week. I have CCC set to erase the external, and copy everything over each time it backs up. The only problem im having is I can't stop Spotlight from indexing/searching my external drive. Adding the drive to the Privacy tab in the Spotlight Prefs works, but only until the next backup, after the next backup, and a restart Spotlight indexes my External drive again. It's annoying cause when I search for files I get 2 of everything. How the heck do I stop spotlight from searching my external?
Is there a way to stop Spotlight indexing everytime I restart?
I use Bootcamp so I'm constantly swapping from Leopard to Windows and when I get into leopard, Spotlight indexes and the computer is slow until it finishes.
Is there any way to pause or stop the spotlight that happens after rebooting? It annoying that it keeps me from using Spotlight until it was done, and recently I was trying to use EyeTV as a DRV, and the video kept freezing, I suspect due to spotlight in the background. It is very frustrating to not be able to fully use my computer for some time after rebooting.
I tried "sudo mdutil -i off" and it didn't seem to have any effect, although I didn't stop the mds process after trying it. I did try killing mds before entering that command, and it just came back after a few seconds.
I have a MBP and I recently did a clean install up to Snow Leopard, and then added all of my movies and files about 150GBs onto my mac. And it was all working perfectly, but now for the past two days I have not been able to use Spotlight as it says it is indexing.
Any ideas why or how this might of happened? I have recently brought iDeFrag and did a quick online DeFrag after I installed windows 7 in boot camp.
I use spotlight alot for finding files and not having it is.
How can I tell if it is still indexing and how long does it take ona clean and jerk install that wipes the HD ? I was experiencing VERY choppy genie efects and dock animations for about 2 hours after the install of Leopard.... oddly seems to come and go WTF
in previous OS versions you could tell when spotlight is indexing by clicking the spotlight icon in the toolbar and the dropdown would tell you. now in yosemite how can we tell when spotlight is indexing? because i use mail.app a lot and search won't work properly until the indexing is done.
My Spotlight doesn't seem to be working properly. It has been indexing for the past couple of weeks and is clearly stuck. It actually says that it is 'estimating indexing time' but hasn't been able to move on from this. Time Machine has also stopped backing up, and I think that this may be a linked issue.
I'm running 10.6.4 on a MacBook Intel 2.4GHz with 2G RAM
So in Windows, if you were to disable Windows Indexing for search (but leave search on), you'll still be able to search for files, just at a extremely slower rate because theres no index available. Having an SSD, this is faster and I like that feature but in OSX, I can't figure out if there's anything to disable indexing but still have spotlight be able to find/search for files.
It's not being done out of paranoia or such, but for some reason, MDS always goes off whenever the system is started, any minor file is changed and such, it's actually being a huge drain on system resources. The MDS runs for about 10 minutes each time, taking up 30-70% cpu usually and i really want to disable it but still have spotlight searching available.
Can this be done? or is something that only windows' would have?
I have had my iMac for months now. However, recently, it's started displaying the blinking dot inside Spotlight.
When I hover over it, all it says (!!!) is "Indexing Volumes". No useful information about "what volume", why it's taking so long (7 hours so far), etc.. If I click the hour glass, spotlight works as always. Does anyone have any ideas what's going on here or what I might try to "fix" this problem. Currently, I'm doing the (Windows) reboot method to clear this "Indexing Volumes", but it comes back.
I cannot disable spotlight - it is endlessly indexing. I have dropped the main drive into Provacy under Spotlight. I have dropped my other 3 drives there as well. I have taken them out and reurned them many times - no change. I repaired disk permissions many times - no change. I downloaded and installed the 10.6.8 Combo update - no change. It keeps indexing and says: Indexing _____________'s Mac Pro. And the estimated time is not there - just that barber pole. And I believe it is affecting my applications - I am having major problems with Avid's Pro Tools 9.0.6. Is there anything else that I can try? I do own Spotless but I stopped using it over a year ago - it didn't seem to do anything more than what I could do using the Privacy option. It it possible that Spotless might be able to do something that I cannot?
Info: Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.8), 16 GB 800 MHz DDR2 FB-DIMM
right, i have a HFS formatted 500gb external drive which i use everyday, but today spotlight just keeps indexing it, it has a lot of media on it which i access daily so spotlight is needed to search it.
I noticed my "spotlight" icon has a pulsing dot in the center of the magnifying glass icon....when I click on it there is a progress bar and it is perpetually "indexing" my hard drive.
Whats this mean? Is my HDD going to fail? Its been going on like this for months. Running Drive Utility, Techtool or Disk Warrior doesn't fix it.
I fixed permissions and repaired the disk off the Snow Leopard book disk, problem persists.
how can I tell if spotlight has indexed main hd? Also, does it index my 2 external hds; one is a Maxtor 1 teribyte hd-other is a 500g. OSX.5.6-Macpro Work station-320g hd-2.8 ghz-10gig ram.---------- Dickster------------
Is there any way to set Spotlight indexing to only work at midnight or some other time? The amount of indexing that goes on constantly is slowing down my work time and finder access during the day.
Info: Mac OS X (10.7.4), ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT, 6 gigs RAM
I have a brand new iMac, that often displays an error stating the mac is out of memory. The mac has 16GB of memory and usually the only software used is Office products and Safari. I noticed that the machine would run out of memory when the mac is doing its index. I can usully see this happening in the spotlight. Below is a screen shot of the activity monitor.
Mac specs: Mac OS X 10.9.3Intel Core i716GB RAM1TB Hard Drive
I have an iomega network drive on which I store my itunes library. However spotlight does not find any files on this drive.
I have tried mdutil -i on /Volumes/Network drive and mdutil -E
It says it has turned on indexing, but it still will not find any files. Does anyone know how to make spotlight index this network drive, or recommend an app that will allow me to search network drives
I upgraded my harddrive this weekend. Here is how I did it:
1.) replaced the hard drive in my laptop 2.) Loaded Leopard onto the new hard drive 3.) Connected my old drive in an enclosure as an external drive 4.) Used the migration assistant to migrate my profile and files from the old drive.
Everything is good, but spotlight doesn't work well. It misses tons of stuff that IS there. I think the drive needs to be re-indexed?
I have a 2012 iMac with 2 partitions, one main partition running Mavericks and one smaller partition running Mountain Lion. I normally do all my work in Mavericks, but sometimes I need to boot into Mountain Lion and do a few things. When booting back into Mavericks it takes at least 30 minutes (if not more) for my Mac to get back to full speed. I think it's primarily due to the spotlight indexing which goes on for 30 minutes or more after the restart. In spotlight prefs I do have my Mountain Lion disk added to privacy so that it won't be indexed, but that doesn't appear to solve the problem. what exactly is it indexing after a reboot and why does it take so long.I would really like my Mac usable at normal speeds within a couple of minutes after a reboot at most.
I am really careful about OXS upgrades, I have a Macbook Air 13" 4GB/256GB ssd, 2013. last monday I finally did the Mavericks upgrade; Mountain Lion was working great, but as Yosemite coming soon, I thought that was a good time to do it. Guess what...
Time Machine is NOT WORKING. I never had a problem with TM, and I use Mac since 90's, so I even can't remember when it came out, but I trade at least 4 Macs using TM and never had an issue.
Now, over Mavericks, it is taking forever. By just now, after almost 30 hours, it is backing up 8.57 GB of 60 GB. I already did the reformating of the TM's drive, it did not work.
I got a new HD external, reformatted on Disk Utility, turno ON and OFF and ON TIme Machine as I read it many times on other posts, and nothing.. It is just taking forever. I never saw this on any other OSX.
Spotlight is indexing too, taking too long, and probably this is the reason (or one of the reasons...) for TM take so long.
I started over wifi, I have an Aiport Express Extended thing, but my Macbook is really close to the first one, on the chain. I made sure that airport is connected to this one, and, it is.
I plugged my TrendNet USB-Ethernet cable, which works really great and fast. Nothing changes, System Preferences recognizes both connections, wifi and ethernet, both are working, but speed did not change at all...
I can't really believe that Apple will leave Time Machine users on this ridiculous situation. But what to do next.
Info: MacBook Air (13-inch Mid 2012), OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.5)
I'd like to install SL on my macbook air 2.13.... but I have a couple of questions for you, who already did it. Is the "spotlight search window" still flickering during a research? (it seems a problem related with SSD machines in Leopard). Is it now warmer? colder? same? How about the fan? Did you notice changes in the way SL use it? Battery life? This machine with SSD is pretty snappy... is it even faster now?
I have a folder with everything from my old computer on it in Andrew/documents/old and i don't want quicksilver to add the files inside that folder to it's index. How do i stop it from doing so?
I just added a 1 Terabyte drive for both backup and regular file storage. I partioned the drive so I would have a volume purely for backup. Backing up to the drive was taking forever, i searched and found index is the problem. I also found a couple ways to stop indexing. I utilized the touch function, but the .metadata_never_index doesn't seem to take at all. I have since utilized the sudo mdutil function for just the backup volume and this works. However..... Will this permanently leave indexing off on this volume? The drive backs up my laptop so it's disconnected frequently. Also does anyone have a guess to why the never index function didn't work? The syntax looked to be perfect.
If I had to pick one thing that is a fundamental feature of the OS, not just Mac OS but any OS, it's the ability to find files - and that functionality is all but completely broken in Leopard. Spotlight in Leopard absolutely sucks. It doesn't find files, it's slow, and there are few options for how to sort found files.
I can't count the number of times that I have tried using it to quickly locate a file, but it can't find it, even thought it's right there on my hard drive. I manually navigate to the file, and yep, I spelled it right...there it is. But it just doesn't appear in the Spotlight results list.
One of the biggest gripes i have with Leopard is Spotlight. I have a 4gb usb drive i put mp3s on to listen to in my car and every time i plug it in Spotlight starts indexing it which means i get stuck with slower read/write speeds until it is done. Is there any way in 10.6 to turn off Spotlight for external drives?
I've been using happily Snow Leopard for a couple of weeks now but last night it just started freezing. Everytime I open Spotlight and look for something I see the spinning beachball... the mouse still works but NOTHING else does (Dock, menus, Finder)... everything just freezes.
