External Drive - Spotlight keeps indexing.

[268144]

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.

how can i fix this?

i mean its been indexing for a good 2 hours.

 

[Signal-11]

Is Spotlight only indexing the drive or is indexing everything else again as well?

IOW, if you reboot with nothing connected, does Spotlight reindex?

 

[mrchinchilla]

I have a problem with something similar to this.
mds when I have my external drive connected, runs at about 170-200+ MB (RSize). And it's quite frustrating, I've tried a lot, from changing permissions of the hidden Spotlight folders in the root of the drive, to playing with privacy settings, and it always just ends up reindexing which takes about 3-4 hours and makes my computer run HOT and use 100%+ CPU.

 

[Signal-11]

I have a problem with something similar to this.
mds when I have my external drive connected, runs at about 170-200+ MB (RSize). And it's quite frustrating, I've tried a lot, from changing permissions of the hidden Spotlight folders in the root of the drive, to playing with privacy settings, and it always just ends up reindexing which takes about 3-4 hours and makes my computer run HOT and use 100%+ CPU.

Similar discussion if not having a Spotlight index will work for you:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/309194/

If you need Spotlight, it might be a corrupted index file, in which case you might consider deleting it and letting it reindex.

 

[mrchinchilla]

Similar discussion if not having a Spotlight index will work for you:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/309194/

If you need Spotlight, it might be a corrupted index file, in which case you might consider deleting it and letting it reindex.

I've tried all of that already. And every time I delete it, or add the metadata_never_index etc. It just indexes again and then I'm back where I started, I just hope SL will fix it, or even 10.5.8.

 

[Signal-11]

I've tried all of that already. And every time I delete it, or add the metadata_never_index etc. It just indexes again and then I'm back where I started, I just hope SL will fix it, or even 10.5.8.

Are you sure that the file is named ".metadata_never_index" and not "metadata_never_index"?

 

[mrchinchilla]

Are you sure that the file is named ".metadata_never_index" and not "metadata_never_index"?

Yes it was a hidden file, in my previous post I didn't go into any detail or make sense as I was eating ice cream. 😎

 

[Signal-11]

Sounds to me like you need to completely start over. Delete your Spotlight index, then have it re-index everything. Or have you tried that already as well?

 

[mrchinchilla]

Sounds to me like you need to completely start over. Delete your Spotlight index, then have it re-index everything. Or have you tried that already as well?

Already tried that..
I have noticed MDS increases in RSIZE whenever Time Machine is backing up, it goes up to about 200MB and stays at about 170~.
Isn't it supposed to return to about 20MB?

 

[Edward Tippins]

How do I stop Spotlight from indexing

Hello,

I'm a newbie to the Mac World, but wanted to give it a try. I have a MacBook Pro notebook (Leopard) and am very impressed with what I see.
My problem: I've been transferring files from my USB's to the hard drive with some success, but suddenly, Spotlight started indexing the USB drive. I don't know how to stop it or why it's happening. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks.

 

[JediMeister]

@ Edward: Navigate to System Preferences, then Spotlight (in the first row), and finally to the Privacy tab. Drag and drop the external hard drive icon from the desktop to the white area in the Privacy tab. The drive should stop indexing.