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Saturn1217

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Apr 28, 2008
1,438
1,199
Feeling so stupid right now:(

Last night I got impatient and decided to try installing snow leopard to an external usb drive that I had lying around. The goal being to test out snow leopard without compromising my work computer (13MBP)

Completely fresh install on the external worked better than I could have imagined. I was patting myself on the back at this point

And then I did something stupid: I had read by many that when you install or make huge changes to os x spotlight indexing happens afterwards. Well I didn't want anything on snow leopard affecting my internal harddrive. I was worried that spotlight might do this so I went into spotlight preferences and excluded my internal hard drive from spotlight indexing (put it on the privacy list)

And then I boot back into my normal leopard 10.5.7 on my internal drive and check the spotlight preferences. My internal drive is STILL excluded from spotlight even though I thought this change would only effect the snow leopard install!

So I took my internal drive off the privacy list and now that mdworker process (spotlight I presume?) is going crazy in activity monitor. I assume the entire drive is being indexed.

My questions:

Should I just let mdworker continue? Will it finish and eventually go back to normal? Anything else I should worry about?

I would like to continue using my external snow leopard install. Does the spotlight indexing osx does change the volume that is being indexed? is it something I should worry about?

Any help appreciated and sorry for the long post!
 
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