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dmelgar

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Apr 29, 2005
1,589
168
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?
 
Spotlight is trying to index the drive. Add it to the privacy tab in Spotlight preferences.

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]
 
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