Spotlight and indexing of other disk partitions

Hi,
I have the internal drive of my 12" PowerBook formatted into two partitions, a small maintenance partition that's running 10.4.8, and a main partition, that's running 10.5.2. While I don't have a problem with upgrading the maintenance partition to Leopard, after seeing this report, I'm wondering if it's not a good idea to have Tiger and Leopard installed on separate partitions of the same internal drive. This leads to my questions:
Question 1:
Is it true that booting into a Tiger installation will cause Spotlight to overwrite the index files that Leopard created on either (or both) partitions? If this is true, then it would seem that I should really upgrade the maintenance partition to Leopard to prevent complete reindexing whenever I switch startup drives from one partition to the other.
Question 2:
Is there any way that I can tell Spotlight on the maintenance partition to not index the main partition? I only boot into the maintenance partition to run tools to maintain the main partition, so I have no need for Spotlight when booted into the maintenance partition.
Question 3:
Even if I upgrade the maintenance partition to Leopard, is there any way that I can prevent each partition's installation from indexing the other?
Thanks,
Ken

I want to make sure that I have each partition's installation set up so Spotlight won't corrupt or redo what the other partition's Spotlight has already done.
You can't do that, which is why I ended up with the less than satisfactory solution I have. When you boot up Spotlight begins to run as part of the system activities. It then looks at every mounted drive. Each and every drive has an invisible Spotlight folder. In that folder are the instructions to Spotlight about whether the drive or any directories on the drive have been excluded from Spotlight, and also, if the drive is supposed to be indexed, then the indexes themselves are in that folder. Thus the command line instruction to turn Spotlight status on or off specifies the path to the particular drive. There is no way to "quarantine" the Tiger or Leopard Spotlight. Whichever version is running looks to see if any given drive is supposed to be indexed, and, if it is, indexes it. The two versions can read each others general instruction about whether or not something is supposed to BE indexed, but can't read each others actual indexes. So if the instruction is for indexing to be on, then the version of Spotlight running looks at the index, can't read the index from the other version, and so proceeds to create a new index.
You can either have Spotlight on or off for a particular drive, that information will be read by both versions of Spotlight and acted on accordingly. Thus I booted in Leopard, ran the command line to turn the status off on my Tiger drive, preventing the drive from being indexed in Leopard, and edited the /etc/hostconfig file for Tiger to disable the Tiger Spotlight. When I booted in Tiger Spotlight didn't run AT ALL, so it didn't re-do the indexing for either the Tiger or Leopard drive. As far as I've been able to figure out this is the best solution, since I am generally booted in Leopard.
If all I had done was to add the Tiger drive to the Leopard Privacy pane, when I booted in Tiger its Spotlight would run, consult the preference for its drive, see it wasn't supposed to index its own startup drive, look at the information on the Leopard drive, see that that drive was supposed to be indexed, be unable to read the index and create a new one. When I next booted into Leopard it would have to re-index its own drive because its index would have been over-written.
Hope that makes a nasty situation clearer. I pondered the conundrum for some time before coming up with a solution. When I am booted in Tiger (which is rarely) I have to remember to use EasyFind when I want to find something, and when I am in Leopard a search of the Tiger drive is "brute force" only, but it can be searched.
Francine
Francine
Schwieder

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Hi,
Now for the question, how to configure the best
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