Stop Mac's Spotlight from indexing!

December 14, 2006 11:37 PM

Please! Stop the Mac OSX Spotlight from indexing.

My friend's Spotlight has been unavailable for the last day. Everytime we click on it, a message pops up stating that the -computer- is being indexed. The estimates on when it's done varies from 4 minutes to 50 hours until indexing is complete (but it lies!).

The machine is a Macbook Duo. We applied a security patch yesterday from Apple. It has OSX 10.4.8. We tried mdutil to erase the index, restart the index via terminal, tried to put the root drive under 'privacy', tried rebooting and fix the permissions. Nothing works.

We attached a firewire drive to the machine and a Spotlight search on that is fine (we disabled root drive indexing by setting the drive to 'privacy' mode). Otherwise, index ad infinitum.

posted by phyrewerx to computers & internet (4 comments total)

This any use?
posted by edd at 11:50 PM on December 14, 2006

Thanks edd, but no go. There were no corrupted files, just opened ones.

Maybe to clarify - it says it will be done in 6 minutes. But when we click on it again, goes back to estimating it will take 6 hours to index.
posted by phyrewerx at 12:09 AM on December 15, 2006

Repeatedly deleting the index means Spotlight is going to repeatedly rebuild it. There may be other problems causing Spotlight to bog down, but you're inadvertently making it do more work. You want to stop the indexing, not remove the index.

Spotlight Tips by the X Lab gives a technique for stopping indexing, but I recommend giving time for Spotlight to do its work if this Mac recently received a shedload of files or is brand-new. You can also try Rebuild Spotlight Index to force Spotlight to start over from scratch (to create a clean index, in case the index itself had gotten corrupted).

The time-to-complete estimate has never been accurate, and you shouldn't go by it.
posted by ardgedee at 2:48 AM on December 15, 2006

To stop indexing forever: Go to a shell and edit "/etc/hostconfig" as root. Reboot.

I prefer Quicksilver to Spotlight any day of the week.
posted by cmiller at 8:16 AM on December 15, 2006