Spotlight endlessly indexing

I recently defragmented my hard drive, and since I did that, Spotlight has not been working properly. When I start up my computer, Spotlight runs fine, but after about 30 minutes, it only says "Indexing Hard Drive." I figured, fair enough. But I left it going for over 14 hours, and it still hasn't even started. It has looked like the link for the past 14 hours, and won't go past this stage. I've rebooted in safe mode, and done everything I can to get Spotlight to work, but to no avail. I have Mac OSX 10.6.4. My hard drive is 500 GB at 5400 RPM. Any suggestions?
Screenshot: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7739498/Screen%20shot%202010-06-28%20at%201.46.24%20PM.p ng

You are a lifesaver. Fixed it perfectly.
For those who might be having this problem, here's exactly what I did.
1. Opened "System Preferences" and went to "Spotlight"
2. Went to the "Privacy" tab
3. Clicked the plus sign at the bottom of the list (Add)
4. Added "Macintosh HD" to the list
5. Quit System Preferences and pressed +Space to see if the problem was fixed (it wasn't)
6. Restarted my computer and logged in
7. Pressed +Space to see if Spotlight was indexing (It wasn't, but that's normal: it usually work for about 20 minutes before starting to try to index)
8. Went to System Preferences-->Spotlight-->Privacy, selected Macintoish HD and pressed the minus sign
9. Pressed +Space to see if Spotlight worked (It was giving me the same message it was before)
10. Closed Spotlight and waited about 40 seconds
11. Pressed +Space again, and Spotlight was about a tenth of the way through indexing
12. Waited about 10 minutes
And voilá, Spotlight has been working ever since. Thank you so much.

Similar Messages

Cannot disable spotlight - endlessly indexing

Hello all,
I cannot disable spotlight - it is endlessly indexing. I have dropped the main drive into Provacy under Spotlight. I have dropped my other 3 drives there as well. I have taken them out and reurned them many times - no change. I repaired disk permissions many times - no change. I downloaded and installed the 10.6.8 Combo update - no change. It keeps indexing and says: Indexing _____________'s Mac Pro. And the estimated time is not there - just that barber pole. And I believe it is affecting my applications - I am having major problems with Avid's Pro Tools 9.0.6.
Is there anything else that I can try? I do own Spotless but I stopped using it over a year ago - it didn't seem to do anything more than what I could do using the Privacy option. It it possible that Spotless might be able to do something that I cannot?
Any ideas would be welcome.

Maybe some file is corrupt in such a way to hang up spotlight. Is it possible for you to run with just your boot drive with the other 3 drives physically removed from the machine? See if it loops that way. If so something may be going on with the boot drive. If not, start adding the removed drives back one-by-one until it gets caught in the loop again.
If this method works at least you can narrow it down to a specific drive. Of course that won't tell you what the problem is on that drive but you at least have a single drive to concentrate on as opposed to 4 of them.
Since you already tried adding these drives to privacy I am not going to suggest the mdutil command to erase the indices (-E) or flag for no indices (-i). I don't think it will change anything and of course won't resolve why it is looping.
Also note that this problem is not unique. Look at the right side of this page for More Like This.
Related articles:
Turning Off Spotlight
The X Lab: Spotlight Tips

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 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 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.

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

How to stop Spotlight from indexing backup drives

Is there any way to stop Spotlight from indexing backup drives?
Thanks

Yes, in Spotlight preferences there is an option to do this. I'm not on my Mac now, so I forget exactly where in Spotlight preferences it is. I believe there is a second tab that you have to click on, then click the "+" sign to add items to Exclude. Just add your backup drive.

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 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.

Convincing spotlight to index other file types

I have a large number of LaTeX documents on my computer, but Spotlight seems unwilling to index them. How can I convince spotlight to go ahead and index/search files with a .tex extension just like it would any other ASCII text file?
Details: LaTeX source code is standard ASCII text, but the files have a ".tex" extension. These files never seem to show up in Spotlight searches, even if I search for terms that I'm certain are included. I'm guessing that Spotlight sees the extension, says "I don't know how to index files of this type" and moves on. How can I tell it to index (and then subsequently search) these files just like normal .txt files? (I'd probably like to do the same with other "source code" file extensions too...) Thanks!

I found that Spotlight would index thousands of my old LaTeX files if I dragged them to another location and then dragged them back again. Unfortunately, I found that just moving the folders they were in was not sufficient.
This move added the metadata "public.plain-text" to all the .tex files, even though, since OS X 10.4, cp amd mv is supposed to preserving metadata and forks (according the man pages of CpMac and MvMac).
I did this after I had modified TeXShop's Info.plist by adding the public.plain-text string to the UTTypeConformsTo key. This is described in the Link: [macosxhints: Add Quick Look support for certain file formats|http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20071028184428583] and by Tristan Hubsch in the Link: [Apple Discussion Topic: How to Spotlight (and QuickView) Hidden and Programming Files?|http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6880380]. I don't know if this is necessary for the change.

Get Spotlight to index a NAS disk?

Is it possible to get Spotlight to index a NAS disk? (Or should it do this normally but it's not working properly?).
I have a NAS disk permanently connected to my Mac (LaCie Ethernet Disk Mini) & every time I do a search on there it will churn away searching but not return any results.
Actually it seems like it might be a bug because as well as not returning any results once I've closed the Finder window it will still continue churning away searching (I can hear the disk activity).
It will continue until I reboot the computer.

OK, the Terminal is a the way that you access UNIX shell commands (the Mac command line interface). Instead of clicking on things you have to type the actual command into the "prompt" hit return, and then the shell executes the command. So you go to the Utilities folder and double click Terminal to launch it. Exactly what you see when it finishes launching will depend on how you have configured it, so it won't be exactly what I see, but there will be some words of encouragement and then the prompt, where you will type things:
Last login: Tue Mar 20 14:06:01 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
-bash:~francine$
The "$" is where you start typing, or you can copy and paste things in also. You would then type:
sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/YOURDRIVENAME/
You must make sure everything you type is exactly as given, thus you may want to simply copy and paste this:
sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/
and, making sure there is no space after that final "/" character, type the name of your drive exactly as it appears in Finder. If the name has any spaces in it be sure to surround it with quotes:
sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/"MY FAT DRIVE"/
Then hit the Return key. You will be asked for your admin password, and given a little lecture (this is only delivered the first time you use a sudo command). The password you type is not echoed to the screen in anyway whatsoever, so type very carefully and when you finish hit the Return key again. You'll then get the notice that indexing is enabled. Type the word exit, hit Return, and then quit Terminal.
Francine
Francine
Schwieder

Spotlight endlessly indexing

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