Spotlight and indexing

i took my laptop (power book g4) in to have the geniuses fix it. the fan was always running. well, they replaced the logic board. and now...
my spotlight cannot find things i am looking for. i have folders with music- that are in itunes, but will not show up in spotlight. i put my hard-drive in the privacy thing to have it not search through it, and then took it out and it indexed. i did that twice but it never works- it will not find any movies, photos, music- nothing except recent web pages and email.
any my keys for the backlit keys do not work either.
any help would be cool. i looked over the suggestions and found stuff for indexing- but if it is not indexing right- then what? it took 35 minutes for indexing- but then missed a boat load of stuff. this is no knock to apple- i love their stuff, this is just a minor inconvenience that can be fixed.
oh- and this never happened with tiger, is leopard not so cool with power pc in the spotlight area?
Message was edited by: Revenant Ananias

hello, same pb for me, not index on part of my library ... there is a bug in spotlight, not corrected by 10,5,3; seames we must wait before see.
(shake spotlight or preferences or anything doesnt work)

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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

Spotlight is indexing but what? And why does it want access to the web?

I can see Spotlight is indexing, it spends several hours a day doing this, every day.
Where can i find more details like previous OS X versions? Which drive, how much time left etc.
Console was no help, any suggestions welcome.
Also, with "Spotlight Suggestions" and "Bing Web Searches" disabled in the Spotlight Search Results references, why is the process "Spotlight Web Content" still trying to access the web several times a day? I am not using Spotlight when this happens nor am i trying to preview any files that have web content in them. Most commonly it tries to connect to static.amazon.com on the http port.

In System Preferences > Spotlight > Search Results, if you have "Bookmarks and History" checked, then the "Spotlight Web Content" background process will crawl any web page that you recently visited to index its keywords. Uncheck that to turn it off.

Time machine preparing forever and spotlight estimating indexing time

hey guys,
Im having two problems that seem to be related. time machine gets stuck on preparing with the following error in console:
Jul 18 17:03:19 Macintosh-5 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[6926]: Waiting for index to be ready (905 > 0)
Spotlight is also acting up and freezes indefinitely whilst estimating indexing time with the following console error:
Jul 18 17:03:44 Macintosh-5 mds[94]: (Error) Server: mdsync launch failed: (ipc/send) invalid destination port
I have not been able to find much on this last error on support forums. Any ideas? I have erased all spotlight indices, reset PRAM, this problems occurs when indexing both the internal and external hard drives. (The drive i am using for time machine has worked in the past.) I have also repaired disk permission etc. Any solutions without reinstalling leopard as the reason why i am trying to back up is so I can do a reinstall then!
Thanks!

I had this exact problem yesterday (Waiting for index to be ready (905 > 0)). I rebooted with the shift key held down, rebooted again, and rebuilt my Spotlight index. Now there seems to be a conflict between Spotlight and Time Machine:
Aug 26 05:03:08 Musa /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[702]: Waiting for Spotlight to finish indexing /Volumes/Backup of Musa/Backups.backupdb
I thought of adding the backup drive to Spotlight's exclusion list, but doesn't the backup drive need to be indexed by Spotlight for it to work with Time Machine?

Spotlight constantly indexing and Time Machine endlessly preparing backup

Hi,
I have a Macbook Pro 5,5 and Mac OS X 10.8.4
Lately I noticed that Spotlight was pretty much constantly indexing, so I went to "System Preferences/Spotlight/Privacy" and I dragged my HD there to prevent Spotlight from indexing it. Then rebooted my laptop and removed my HD again, which caused my Spolight to start indexing again.
After a night of indexing, everything seemed to be working fine. Nevertheless, today Spotlight is once again constantly indexing my computer, and the bar just won't go beyond "Estimating Indexing Time". What could I do to solve this issue?
Related to this, I assume, is my inability to backup through Time Machine. I feel like Time Machine is waiting for Spotlight to complete its indexing in order to start its backup-job, is that correct?
Thanks for your help,
Sander

If you have more than one user account, these instructions must be carried out as an administrator.
Triple-click anywhere in the line below on this page to select it:
syslog -k Sender mdworker -o -k Sender mds | grep -v boxd | tail | open -f -a TextEdit
Copy the selected text to the Clipboard (command-C).
Launch the Terminal application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Terminal in the icon grid.
Paste into the Terminal window (command-V).
The command may take a noticeable amount of time to run. Wait for a new line ending in a dollar sign (“$”) to appear.
A TextEdit window will open with the output of the command. If the command produced no output, the window will be empty. Post the contents of the TextEdit window (not the Terminal window), if any — the text, please, not a screenshot. The title of the window doesn't matter, and you don't need to post that.

Spotlight endlessly indexing and mdworker process using lot of cpu

Hi, I just did Archive&Install from Tiger to Leopard, applied 10.5.1 and now...
...since THREE DAYS Spotlight is indexing giving strange values for time remaining (2.134.545.673 hours).
Like I found in other threads, I have the mdworked process absorbing a lot of cpu power and, from Console, maybe it's crashing repeatedly. I made private of lots of folders but the problem is still there.
Any other idea?
How can I find which file/application is freezing mdworker and making Spotlight so unuseful?
Thanks in advance
Tampano

I don't know. How much data is on your HD? Simplest thing to do is use the Terminal command mdutil to erase the current indexes and rebuild them. This should do it:
*sudo mdutil -E /Volumes/(asterisk)*
Launch the Terminal.app in /Applications/Utilities/, copy & paste that command into the window, hit the return key, enter your admin password at the Password: prompt (carefully because nothing shows up on the screen), and hit the return key again. That should erase the indexes and rebuild them.

Spotlight not indexing after hard drive replaced

Hi all
Just wondering if anyone knows how to encourage Spotlight to re-index? Just had my hard drive replaced as part of the recall, and now Spotlight wont index anything.
I've tried previous suggestions (adding and removing hard drive to privacy list, commands through terminal etc), but it's still not working. All the software is up to date (10.7.5).
Any ideas? It's incredibly annoying, and making working on this computer virtually impossible at the moment.
Cheers

If you have more than one user account, these instructions must be carried out as an administrator.
Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Console in the icon grid.
Step 1
Make sure the title of the Console window is All Messages. If it isn't, select All Messages from the SYSTEM LOG QUERIES menu on the left.
Enter "mdworker" (without the quotes) in the Filter text field. Post the most recent 50 or so messages that appear in the Console window — the text, please, not a screenshot.
If there are runs of repeated messages, post only one example of each. Don't post many repetitions of the same message.
When posting a log extract, be selective. Don't post more than is requested.
Please do not indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into a message.
Some personal information, such as the names of your files, may be included — edit that out, too, but don’t remove the context.
Step 2
Do the same with the search string "mds".

Force Spotlight to Index a FW HDD

Hello!
Well, I recently aquired (as in 2 days ago) a Seagate 400GB FireWire/USB drive. I have it connected via FW.
Well, after formatting it to Mac Extended format, I partitioned it for a 60G section (intended for a secondary boot volume) and a 320 GB volume.
Yesterday, I coppied all 6 gig of data from our old G4's hard drive. Tonight, I want to look for a couple of files - but spotlight hasn't indexed anything - so not even find will find the files.
How do you force spotlight to index a hard drive?
-Dan

To force a volume to index just drag it into the privacy window for a moment and then drag it out.
-mj
[email protected]

Spotlight still indexing after upgrading to 10.6.7

I upgraded my 3-1/2 year old black MacBook to OS X 10.6.7 the other day, and after I rebooted, Spotlight began indexing my drive and has been stuck at "Estimating index time" ever since.
Is this a known issue, or am I the only one?
I'm not sure why it started indexing again, but how can I get it to stop?

Hi,
Try to stop NAT, than start Setup Gateway Assistant again, may be help.
Note: you should be sure your firewall is in correct setup. My NAT some time stop and can not start again because of my firewall "open" much ports than nessesary.

Spotlight and iCal search not working after upgrade to Leopard

I recently upgraded my MBP to Leopard (10.5.7), and everything seemed fine. Except search in iCal wasn't working. I looked in forums and found a suggestion - renaming Calendar Cache in Home>>Library>>Calendars, then restarting iCal. iCal rebuilt the Calendar Cache (or looked like it was, progress bar and all), but search still wasn't working, failing to bring up events I was looking right at.
Then I tried to use Spotlight, and it didn't seem to be working either. I tried searching for Safari, and after a brief pause, Spotlight said "No Result Found." I confirmed Safari is in fact still on my MBP and working (opened from applications folder). After some more hunting on forums, I found a thread talking about how to force Spotlight to re-index, figuring that was at least Spotlight's problem. Here's the thread - http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=381832
I tried what it suggested, using the command line in Terminal, but Terminal just spat back "No Index." So now I'm stumped. Any ideas? I've already tried rebooting, to no effect, though I'll try it again tonight.

Well, thanks again for all the suggestions, but I sort of stumbled on the fix - which turned out to be upgrading MacFUSE. I had forgotten I installed that so I could read/write to my BootCamp Windows partition under Tiger, and a couple times when I would restart my computer I'd get an error message about MacFUSE (ironically, the error claimed my OS was out of date, but it was really MacFUSE that was out of date).
After I updated to the latest version of MacFUSE and restarted, Spotlight started indexing. Now it works just fine. Not sure if this is a known issue, but it seems that was most likely the problem.
Now I just have to figure out why the search feature in Calendar doesn't work... already tried rebuilding the Calendar Cache multiple times. Any ideas for that one?

Spotlight and FAT32

A nasty side effect of bootcamp is: If the windows partition is FAT32, spotlight will index it completely once a day upon the first boot of that day (well, it takes several minutes for spotlight to be useable, while the volume gets indexed).
In the privacy settings of spotlight, i removed the winXP volume from spotlight indexing, and now by leopard boot is blazingly faster than before.
Can somebody confirm this? this should be documented explicitly somewhere; or at least this message will help somebody googling an answer to his "spotlight daily slow indexing time" issue.

The more I use Vista, the more I like how it allows configuration. Having to "opt-out" rather than opt-in seems the reverse of what I like. After 7 yrs I've also learned the quarks of OS X and to use tools like Spotless or TinkerTool to control Spotlight and other features.
It would also be affected by the speed of your main drive, that XP is on the slowest tracks, and that it has to "jump" or do a full drive seek to get to files there. And by how much free space is on Windows.
But it should just be checking for changes. Trouble is in the way FAT volumes don't keep file atributes or metadata perhaps (could be totally off, but it seems like copying files to/from FAT I lose the creation and modification date and other items).
if you picked the Mac OS format, you'll be avoiding the silly reindex-every-time FAT thing.
You'll know that the indexing is pretty much good to go once the drive stops crunching away nonstop, and there is no pulsing dot in the Spotlight menu icon.
Ouch! it was brought up on MacRumors Forum.
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=272044
The person that might need this, doesn't yet KNOW they do!

How can I stop Spotlight from indexing external drives?

I work in an environment where we plugin several different costumer harddrives all day long as part of our working process. Often only to extract one file from a given drive. Therefore its annoying that Spotlight automatically starts indexing these drives, because it slows down everthing, but also because our windows costumers suddenly see these weird mac files on their drives, that are invisible to the macuser. The Privacy setting is not of much use, as its impossible to add oru costumers drives to the list - we simply don't know the drive until we see it.
How can spotlight stop indexing?

The Privacy option is okay for private users, but at work we receive alot of harddrives from costumers and we simply cannot spend the extra time waiting for a drive to be indexed every time it is connected. That drive may never be connected again as it belongs to a costumer, and it is impossible for us to add drives to the Privacy pane, because we do not know they exist before we see them infront of us. The ption to disable all external drives from being indexed would be great. Or that the indexing can be stopped in the spotlight menu, or that the indexing will not start until 10 minutes after the drive has been mounted - and only if the drive is inactive.

Stop Spotlight from indexing new drives

I know how to block a drive in Spotlight's privacy settings.
What I'm looking for is a way to stop Spotlight from indexing a drive every time I plug one in. I'm often connecting external drives for work & spotlight immediatley starts to index & I go in and add it to the blocked list in Spotlight> Privacy.
Is there a way to just have Spotlight NOT try to index a new drive?

Sorry, I missed that part.
Try this, add this file to the external drive.
touch /Volumes/name of the external drive/.metadata_never_index
This will add a file called .metadata_never_index to the root of that drive.
You can also disable spotlight
sudo mdutil -a -i off
To re-enable Spotlight:
sudo mdutil -a -i on

IPhoto/Spotlight not indexing SOLUTION

For those iPhoto 6 users whoose comments and keywords not being indexed by Spotlight, here is the solution to your problem!
If you are getting * Parsing file: '~/Pictures/iPhoto Library/AlbumData.xml'
ERROR: syntax error (<key>PhotoCount</key>) when you try to manually index your iPhoto library with mdimport, this will solve your problem!
You can only have single-line comments on your photos:
- Create a smart album: "Comments... contains... [option][return]"
Note: press option+return with your keyboard... the box will appear blank
- The smart album should become populated with photos where you entered a comment containing a character return
- Click the ( i ) in the bottom left-hand corner to draw up the info for each file, and manually remove the character break until your smart alum is empty OR go to Photos -> Batch Change and enter a new comment. Make sure that "append" is UNCHECKED -- This will overwrite all of the comments.
Now, you must also make sure you only have single-line comments on your rolls:
- From the iPhoto Library, go to View -> Sort Photos -> By Film Roll
- Hold the Apple (command) key, and click the drop down triangle once or twice (until all are collapsed)
- Manually examine each roll and make sure that the comments (if any) are all on one line.
Note: If the comments are all on one line, the whole line will be visible in the collapsed view under the Film Roll name
Quit iPhoto
Open Terminal (in the Utilities folder)
- Type mdimport -f ~/Pictures and hit return
- After some time, a message should come up saying:
* Parsing file: '~/Pictures/iPhoto Library/AlbumData.xml'
As long as there is not an error message underneath, this is good!
- When the command has finished running and you're at a blank prompt again, quit Terminal
Open iPhoto
- Click iPhoto in the menu bar, and go to Preferences
- Click the Keywords tab
- Click the "+" and create a new keyword called Spotlight
- Close out of iPhoto preferences
- From the iPhoto Library, select all of the photos (Edit -> Select All)
- Get info on the files (Photos -> Get Info)
- Select the Keywords tab
- CHECK the box that says [Spotlight] *THIS MIGHT TAKE A WHILE
- UNCHECK the box that says [Spotlight] * THIS MIGHT TAKE A WHILE
Note: This forces all of the pictures to be updated in the database
- Quit iPhoto
Search for your comments and keywords with Spotlight

Can I ask, does this need to be done every time you add photos to iPhoto, or is this a one-off trick to get Spotlight to look at iPhoto keywords in the first place?
My first experience with iPhoto is iPhoto6 so I don't have any baggage that I am bringing from earlier copies of iPhoto. I've imported in 1500 photos and am working my way through tagging them with keywords and am hoping that spotlight will index them. Is this bug related to keywords applied in older versions of iPhoto, or does the issue manifest itself even on a brand new library? Are Apple looking to patch iPhoto / Spotlight to resolve this?
Thanks.
Graham

IPhoto/Spotlight not indexing SOLUTION *edit

For those iPhoto 6 users whoose comments and keywords not being indexed by Spotlight, here is the solution to your problem!
If you are getting * Parsing file: '~/Pictures/iPhoto Library/AlbumData.xml'
ERROR: syntax error (<key>PhotoCount</key>) when you try to manually index your iPhoto library with mdimport, this will solve your problem!
You can only have single-line comments on your photos:
- Create a smart album: "Comments... contains... [option][return]"
Note: press option+return with your keyboard... the box will appear blank
- The smart album should become populated with photos where you entered a comment containing a character return
- Click the ( i ) in the bottom left-hand corner to draw up the info for each file, and manually remove the character break until your smart alum is empty OR go to Photos -> Batch Change and enter a new comment. Make sure that "append" is UNCHECKED -- This will overwrite all of the comments.
Now, you must also make sure you only have single-line comments on your rolls:
- From the iPhoto Library, go to View -> Sort Photos -> By Film Roll
- Hold the Apple (command) key, and click the drop down triangle once or twice (until all are collapsed)
- Manually examine each roll and make sure that the comments (if any) are all on one line.
Note: If the comments are all on one line, the whole line will be visible in the collapsed view under the Film Roll name
Quit iPhoto
Open Terminal (in the Utilities folder)
- Type mdimport -f ~/Pictures and hit return
- After some time, a message should come up saying:
* Parsing file: '~/Pictures/iPhoto Library/AlbumData.xml'
As long as there is not an error message underneath, this is good!
- When the command has finished running and you're at a blank prompt again, quit Terminal
Open iPhoto
- Click iPhoto in the menu bar, and go to Preferences
- Click the Keywords tab
- Click the "+" and create a new keyword called Spotlight
- Close out of iPhoto preferences
- From the iPhoto Library, select all of the photos (Edit -> Select All)
- Get info on the files (Photos -> Get Info)
- Select the Keywords tab
- CHECK the box that says [Spotlight] *THIS MIGHT TAKE A WHILE
- UNCHECK the box that says [Spotlight] * THIS MIGHT TAKE A WHILE
Note: This forces all of the pictures to be updated in the database
- Quit iPhoto
Search for your comments and keywords with Spotlight

Can I ask, does this need to be done every time you add photos to iPhoto, or is this a one-off trick to get Spotlight to look at iPhoto keywords in the first place?
My first experience with iPhoto is iPhoto6 so I don't have any baggage that I am bringing from earlier copies of iPhoto. I've imported in 1500 photos and am working my way through tagging them with keywords and am hoping that spotlight will index them. Is this bug related to keywords applied in older versions of iPhoto, or does the issue manifest itself even on a brand new library? Are Apple looking to patch iPhoto / Spotlight to resolve this?
Thanks.
Graham

Spotlight and indexing

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