Spotlight Won't Ignore External Drive

[phanofwclark]

In short: I have an external drive connected to my computer that I do not want spotlight to index or search. Is there any way to do this from the command line?

In Detail: i have external drive that spotlight always searches before my internal drive, and it takes an additional 10 seconds to search the external (about 2 for the entire internal). I have erased the spotlight index and turned indexing off on the external drive, but spotlight still searches it. Is there some sort of command I can do to set spotlight to search only my internal drive? (e.g., set defaults only to search internal, or somehow force spotlight to not recognize external?)

I cannot drag the external drive, or any folders from it, into the privacy pane of system preferences. Also, I need the external connected to my computer, as I use backup 3 with it everyday.

 

[mrichmon]

In short: I have an external drive connected to my computer that I do not want spotlight to index or search. Is there any way to do this from the command line?

Don't know about the command line, although adding the external drive to the Spotlight privacy list may go part of the way to achieving what you want. The shareware program Spotless (http://www.fixamacsoftware.com/software/spot/) disables spotlight on specific drives.

 

[phanofwclark]

Spotless will not see my drive. It sees my internal drive, iDisk, and a Disk image, but will not recognize it. That is why I am so confused - in some cases, Mac OS X seems to recognizxe the drive is there (e.g., on the desktop, when I need to back up files), but other times it doesn't...

 

[Abstract]

I don't like how Spotlight has to index my external HDD every time I plug it in because it takes a lot longer for my Mac to recognise that the blasted thing is plugged in.

 

[phanofwclark]

Well, after some more fiddling, I decided to reindex the drive, and spotlight works just fine now (much faster than before too... probably because of the enhancements in 10.4.3).

 

[thepopoman]

Spotlight only sees my internal HD drive

It does not report any files in any of my external drives.
I only have one external drive excluded in the privacy tab of the system preferences for spotlight. But the other drives should be indexed and let me find things. Don't understand why it's confined to just the HD?