Spotlight Indexing External Drives

I have been waiting about a week for Spotlight to Index my external drives, but the magnifying glass continually only shows "Estimating indexing time..." for each drive and never seems to go any further.
Any clues?
Thanks.
-Aaron

Aaron Welch wrote:
I have been waiting about a week for Spotlight to Index my external drives, but the magnifying glass continually only shows "Estimating indexing time..." for each drive and never seems to go any further.
It clearly doesn't like something on one of them. I'd start by excluding all of them from indexing, via System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy, then running +*Repair Disk+* (not permissions) on each one, via Disk Utility, in your Applications/Utilities folder.
Then remove the exclusions, one at a time. If one hangs like that again, you'll at least know which one it is, and can try a process of elimination by excluding folders on that drive.

Similar Messages

  • Good application to index external drives

    Does anyone have an application to recommend that will index external drives so that I can browse or search their contents when they are not mounted?

    What you want is a disk cataloging utility. Look for them at VersionTracker or MacUpdate.

  • 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.

  • Prevent Spotlight From Indexing External Drive?

    Is there a way to prevent spotlight from commencing to index an external drive immediately upon connection?

    As Király says, once you have put the volume into System Preferences > Spotlight > 'Privacy' tab it will remain there - with one caveat, though...
    Bear in mind that if you ever erase that volume it will have gone from the 'Privacy' tab (because erasing gives the volume a new UUID) and will need to be replaced.
    NB:  It's not actually the drive that goes into the 'Privacy' tab - it's the volume(s) on the drive.

  • Spotlight indexes every drive I attach to my computer

    Hi. Every time I attach an external HD or USB flash drive, Spotlight decides to start indexing it. I guess this can be a good feature in some cases, but when I attach my friends 300GB external HD which is completely full, it takes more than half an hour to do the indexing, which means that I basically can't use the drive for this whole time because Spotlight is using the drive at its full capabilities. Does anyone know of a way to turn off this automatic feature of Spotlight? Also, where does Spotlight's index file get stored: my internal HD or the HD/flash drive that the index file is for?
    -Eric

    Go to System Preferences / Spotlight / Privacy. Drag the icon for your newly mounted external hard drive from the Desktop into the Privacy list. Click on Show All to exit the Spotlight preferences pane or just exit System Preferences.
    Spotlight will stop indexing that drive and discard whatever indexing it had already produced for that drive. If you mount that drive frequently, you can just leave it in the Privacy list if you'd like. If this is a one time thing, then after Ejecting and disconnecting that drive you can select that line in the Privacy list and delete it by clicking on the "-" at the bottom of the list.
    --Bob

  • Spotlight erased external drive?

    I have a Western Digital 320 gb Personal Edition external drive connected through USB. Today I started Time Machine for the first time. I noticed as TM was backing up my files from one internal drive to another that Spotlight was indexing my external drive. Didn't think anything of it, indexing is usually a good thing.
    Checked the WD drive post TM initiation, and it's empty, by the looks of the gigabytes available, wiped clean.
    Questions: How can this happen? Are the files truly gone, or by some trick they'll reappear? I won't restart my computer until I hear a somewhat definitive answer, and potential solution. Thanks!

    OK, having not turning off the Western Digital 320 gig drive since beginning this, my Command-I reveals though it is a 320 gig drive and shows there are 0 files, two things to note:
    1. It is now formatted as a MS-DOS (FAT 32) drive instead of the original Mac initialized disk.
    2. Though the capacity is 320 gb, there is only 120 gb. available, meaning the Mac files/.jpgs/mp3 apparently still exist on the drive, but are now rendered invisible?
    Great - invisible files.
    SO: Can simply indexing an external drive reformat it to MS-DOS Fat 32?
    If so, how do I access the existing files? They do not appear erased.
    PROCESS:
    1. I plugged in a Mac-formatted external Western Digital drive using USB with 200gb of information on it,
    2. started Time Machine to back up to a secondary internal drive,
    3. simultaneously and automatically the external drive began to be indexed while starting up Time machine, and
    4. now post-indexing it shows 0 files available - how can this happen, how does indexing reformat a Mac-initialized drive into a MS-DOS (FAT-32) drive while still retaining the existing files on the drive?? I am dumbfounded.

  • Disable spotlight for External Drives

    I have 5 macs, and several USB and Firewire drives.  Most of these external drives are plugged into different machines from time to time.  None sit permanantly in any machine (because most of my machines are laptops).
    I'd like to prevent Spotlight from indexing my External drives.
    I know I can (after plugging in a EXT drive), use the privacy function in the Spotlight Preferences.  But with a dozen or so external drives (HDD and Thumb) on 5 machines, that's too much work each time I plug a drive into a machine.
    I read that the existence of a ".metadata_never_index" file prevents Spotlight indexing.  I assume this works, but it's hard to tell for sure, because the moment I plug a drive in, my machine seems to start indexing faster than I can create this file.  So I wind up with a .Spotlight-V100 directory.  I was hoping that OSX would delete this for me after I set Privacy or add the ".metadata_never_index" file.  But it does not.   It may be that I have to delete it manually (probably because Privacy is a COMPUTER setting (not on HDD setting).
    QUESTIONS:
    Does the ".metadata_never_index" file supported by OSX (Mavericks and MtnLion).
    Can I delete the .Spotlight-V100 directory in my EXT Drives, without the risk of causing a problem?
    If I put a ".metadata_never_index" file in /Volume, will it effectively prevent indexing on any mounted drive, without affecting the Macintosh HD indexing?
    Is there an non-invisible equivilent to ".metadata_never_index"  (so it's more obvious when indexing is turned off).

    Glad you found that helpful.
    The Privacy listing for a given external only disappears when the external isn't attached; it reappears when it is attached so either a local record of "Don't Index" is only shown as necessary or, more likely, that record is on the external and is read as part of the mounting process when it's connected. While the process of putting each external on each Mac's Privacy list is a pain, it should only be necessary to do it once. Whether the Don't Index flag is Mac specific, so that Mac 1 doesn't want that external indexed but Mac 2 does, is another question.
    I do think the Don't Index flag or file is separate from the partition's logical name because, when I erase the partition in preparation for a new backup clone, I don't change the name of the partition, and the name of the device to be cloned doesn't change either. Rather, it may simply be a Spotlight related file that gets erased along with everything else.
    Fortunately, I don't have to worry about Spotlight; apart from the Privacy listing, I have all of the Search Results options unchecked, so there's very little to index on the boot partition. Spotlight can't be turned off altogether though because it interacts with the App Store regarding purchases and downloads. For finding things, I use EasyFind, which, while not able to find content in documents, looks inside of everything else, including Packages and hidden System files, and does it on demand without having to index anything. Another advantage of that is, by not tinkering with OS files, including those associated with Spotlight under the hood, when a new OS changes how things work, there's less risk of a deeply hidden self inflicted bug.

  • Yosemite - Spotlight NTFS external drive indexing issue

    Good morning!
    Yosemite's spotlight doesn't seem to find any of the files on my external NTFS hard drive. I would like to know whether there is  a way or not to get it done.
    PS: I've added it to the privacy tab, removed it and it still not indexing. Also used the  "sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist" code in terminal.

    By default, OS X ships with NTFS read capability. OS X would need a third-party (Tuxera, Paragon) NTFS driver package that enables NTFS write functionality in order for Spotlight to index the NTFS drive.

  • Indexing External Hard Drives Help

    Hello,
    I’m sure this question has been asked in some for or another previously, however, a quick search didn’t turn up the results I was looking for.
    Here’s my question. In previous versions of OSX I could index certain drives, folders, etc. So how do I index external drives now? I have to search thousands of files on external drives that I need to search by file content or code strings contained within the files.
    I have tried to add the search filter of “Contents”, but that really does nothing. (at least on my machine – no results) I seems as though this is because the drives are not indexed.
    So, can Spotlight index external drives, or am I stuck with something like Google Desktop? If it can’t be done, I can’t imagine why Apple would have gotten rid of a seemingly common function like searching document contents on other than root hard drives.
    Thanks.

    Might give a try with Spotless...
    http://www.fixamac.net/software/spot/
    To see if it can fix it.
    But, I use EasyFind...
    http://www.devon-technologies.com/download/
    Near the bottom of the page.

  • Confirmation on How to Stop Spotlight Indexing an External Hard Drive

    Hello everyone,
    I know there are a number of posts on this but I just want to confirm: Can I stop Spotlight from indexing my external FireWire hard drive by adding its name to the Privacy pane in Spotlight's preferences when the drive is mounted? (I'm a little low on internal hard disk space on my iBook so I want to keep the index as lean as possible.)

    Georgy
    Keep in mind that the index is stored on the drive that is being indexed. As such, indexing an external volume does not affect your main drive.
    Remember also, that when you do update your external drive, the indexing only updates the changes made to the drive on the fly, provided of course if it is mounted and allowed to do so.
    My suggestion, let Spotlight index the drive. Particularly if you are using it as a backup. Once in place, updating the index and searching is extremely fast.
    Be careful however, of using third-party solutions. Some will affect Spotlight's normal indexing process and their preferences have to be changed for Spotlight to work.

  • Spotlight index unreliable on removable volumes

    I have a removable drive that I want to index with Spotlight. As long as the drive is connected, Spotlight indexes the drive correctly.
    If I unmounted the drive, disconnected it, and reconnected it, Spotlight will not "see" the index in that volume any more--none of the hits in that volume will be returned by the Spotlight search.
    AFAIK the hidden Spotlight folders (.DS_Store and .Spotlight-V100) still exist on the volume. It's just that Spotlight does not reintegrate the index into its master index.
    I can fix the problem by either going to System Preferences, and adding the volume to the Privacy list, then removing it; or by using the CLI command sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/Name followed by sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/Name (which does the same thing).
    Is this a known bug? Is there a workaround?

    Dave Rahardja wrote:
    I have a removable drive that I want to index with Spotlight. As long as the drive is connected, Spotlight indexes the drive correctly.
    If I unmounted the drive, disconnected it, and reconnected it, Spotlight will not "see" the index in that volume any more--none of the hits in that volume will be returned by the Spotlight search.
    AFAIK the hidden Spotlight folders (.DS_Store and .Spotlight-V100) still exist on the volume. It's just that Spotlight does not reintegrate the index into its master index.
    I can fix the problem by either going to System Preferences, and adding the volume to the Privacy list, then removing it; or by using the CLI command sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/Name followed by sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/Name (which does the same thing).
    Is this a known bug? Is there a workaround?
    That could be a bug. You might file a bug report with Apple about it. If others have same issue they will let you know.
    File here:
    https://bugreport.apple.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/RadarWeb.woa/wa/signIn
    If you reconnect the external drive and then reboot, does Spotlight pick it back up?
    If so, what happens if you simply reconnect the drive and logoff and back on?
    Spotlight is supposed to automatically access any attached drive not in the exclude list.

  • Continued Spotlight Indexing Problems

    I'm still having problems with Spotlight indexing my drives into infinity. I just had a new 320g drive installed on my machine and, as I've posted before, Spotlight went ballistic trying to index it, telling me it had "2147483648 hours remaining" to complete indexing. As before, Activity Monitor shows mds taking over the system, hogging nearly 100% of the processor and causing the fan on my MacBook to go into overdrive.
    As before, the only solution seems to be to shut Spotlight down completely. Using Spotless caused a freeze at first, and I had to reboot it and try again.
    Does anybody know why this problem is so persistent? I've also noticed that Spotlight does not seem to search inside System Libraries any longer. Can anyone else verify this?

    I'm having the same problem as well. I got a tool called Spotless. Which wasn't much help. I even deleted the index completely, restarted it and it still indexed ad infinitum. I think there's a problem with certain filenames or filetypes where it just chokes. Instead of crashing or erroring, it just stalls and keeps going. I'm trying to index my disks one at a time. But my system disk is the problem I think.

  • How do I get my exfat formatted external drive indexed by spotlight?

    Well I own a macbook pro and a Toshiba external drive that orginally came with Texura NTFS software so it could work with Mac. But I decided to format it from NTFS to exfat since I ended up losing the Texura program when I formated my macbook hardrive and I accidentally put the .dmg program on the macbook hard drive before I formatted it. I should have put the program back on the drive but I decided to solve the problem by formatting my drive to exfat. But now my problem is that spotlight will not index the drive.
    Does anyone know how to fix this problem? or are they any third part applications that I can use to search my external hard drive that act as spotlight alternatives?

    To force Spotlight to index the drive open System Preferences->Spotlight; Privacy and add the exfat drive to the list, you can drag it from the desktop or finder, then remove it from the list.
    The act of removing a drive from the excluded list causes Spotlight to index the drive.
    If that doesn't work post back.
    regards

  • Problem "ejecting" external drive after spotlight indexes it

    I had posted to a string that I can't find. Anyway, I've installed Leopard on my 2.0 GHz MacBook. I had to erase all my data to install. (I was in a loop for a little bit but the install kicked in eventually.) After installing Leopard, I attached an external HD to it to transfer some documents, music, etc. that was on the MacBook before. That all went well. I have not done any configurations for Time Machine.
    I am trying to "eject" this hard drive and I keeping getting a message "The disk "NAME OF DRIVE" is in use and could not be ejected. Try quitting applications and try again."
    What initially happened was that spotlight was automatically indexing it. That is over. I still can't eject it.
    I'm out of all applications except "Finder" which is always on. This is a MacBook that is now tied to my desk until I can disconnect this external drive from it. I'm afraid of just unplugging it from the firewire as I've had a similar drive crash when I did that on another mac a few months ago.
    I've done "restart" and turned it off and restarted manually. The drive still won't eject.
    Any help is appreciated. I haven't been able to figure it out so far.
    Some additional info: The external drive does have "clone" copies of the applications that were on my MacBook before I had my MacBook "erased" to install Leopard. I don't have any of those applications running. I don't think that would matter, but the message keeps saying to quit applications.
    Thanks

    I don't have an answer for this yet, but I have an additional clue. I've had this happen to me a couple of times since upgrading to Leopard. The first time I was able to fix it by quitting all programs and logging out completely, and then logging in as a different user and ejecting the disk from that account. And now I currently have the same issue, but I've been working so I couldn't take the time to log myself out just to eject an external disk.
    What I did find out about it, in my case, is that it seems to be related to the new auto-activation feature for fonts. A quick check to see what files are open on the drive that won't eject reveals:
    Lightning:/> lsof /Volumes/Backup\ 2
    COMMAND PID USER FD TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME
    ATSServer 1187 disco txt REG 14,6 32892 71832 /Volumes/Backup 2/Backups/disco/Fonts/VT102Font/..namedfork/rsrc
    So somehow Leopard found a font buried in a non-standard location on a backup disk and opened it... It shows up in my fonts menu in TextEdit, for example, but it does not show up on FontBook so I haven't found a way to turn it back off so I can eject the disk. I did go to the FontBook preferences and found where "Automatic font activation" is turned on by default and also checked "Ask me before activating", which was turned off... Hopefully from now on that will let me head off rogue font activation before it becomes an issue.

  • Spotlight looses index for external drives

    Hello
    why is that I have to re index my external drives all the time. it seems to me spotlight can not keep the index, when ever i try search in my external hard-drive spotlight finds nothing even so i can see files with the search name right in front of me. I have to go to preference than add the hard drive at the no search column and delete out if it then spotlight starts the indexing again which takes 2+hours and slows things down. it is good for a while and bam it is gone again and have to do all the steps over again any idea

    Mark Barron wrote:
    The Spotlight search of my external hard drive gets buggy after a while and just stops seeing items on the drive. It is a terabyte drive that takes FOREVER to reindex and bogs down my MPB 2.5 in the process. Even with a Firewire 800 connection. I'd LOVE to be able to attach this to another mac and run the reindex. Guess that would only work if the index file was actually on the external drive, and not on the boot drive. The genius/apple care guys at Mac gave some vague/dodging answer like.. we don't support external hard drives.
    LOL! that's a good one.
    Does anybody have a real suggestion?
    the spotlight index IS stored on the drive itself so if you want to reindex it using a different computer, go for it. just make sure to use the same OS computer. DO NOT reindex it using a tiger computer.

Maybe you are looking for