Spotlight problem. mds hangs

Not sure whats changed, but now when I plug in my external drives. Spotlight (mds) spins for a good while then eventually hangs. I can't figure out what the problem is.

The last thing I see in the console when it hangs is,
7/16/10 12:23:09 PM mdworker[49840] CFPropertyListCreateFromXMLData(): Old-style plist parser: missing semicolon in dictionary.

How can I figure out what file its getting hung up on?

 

Of course its indexing the drive.

But after a while it gets hung. No access to disk, no CPU usage, but Spotlight still says its indexing. When its hung the console has the message I listed.

 

I was able to go through a process to erase and rebuild the Spotlight index. That has apparently resolved the problem.

Would be nice if Apple made it more robust. This was a major hassle to resolve.

The basic steps are as follows. Commands need to be run from administrator userid with sudo in a command line (terminal) window. The idea is to stop spotlight on all volumes, when one at a time, renable spotlight, erase the index and have it recreate the index.

To stop spotlight on all drives,
sudo mdutil -a -i off

To restart spotlight
sudo mdutil -i on /Volume/[volumeName]

To erase index after its started
sudo mdutil -E /Volume/[volumeName]