Spotlight is indexing, but no pulsing dot

Wonder if anyone has this issue. My MBP (2009 5,3, latest Mtn. Lion) seems to perform Spotlight indexing, but the pulsing dot only pulses for a few minutes.
The rest of the time when it's indexing, the dot is absent.
I have removed the main drive from Spotlight, and replaced it, but the same thing occurs.
Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Thanks!

I have rarely seen the pulsing dot in the magnifying glass during indexing. So I can't say whether the "no dot" is a new behavior in Mountain Lion - or whether I just simply never noticed the dot in the past.
I just forced a re-index of an external USB drive - by adding the volume to the list of locations not to be indexed - and then after a few minutes - removed the volume from the list. After removal - a fresh re-indexing process has started - and the only way that I am aware of the indexing being activie is by noting that the external drive is actively doing something - or by clicking on the magnifying glass - where I can then see the indexing progress bar.
I really only ever notice indexing activity after copying large folders to a volume or after a restore of some sort.

Similar Messages

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.

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 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.

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.

Need Spotlight to index a few folders only

I'm in Spotlight ****. I basically want to disable it but Logic uses Spotlight to find sounds, so I need to index a few folders in the Library/AppSupport and User/Library/AppSupport only. The problem is that I can add volumes and folders to the privacy area, but these folders I want indexed are nested in folders with lots of other folders. So short of adding hundreds of items to my Privacy area, how do I do the reverse.....have Spotlight ignore everything but a few select folders?
Also, since I can't narrow down to the few folders I need, I've ended up with around 100gb of info that SL is indexing. It's saying that it will take a little over 7 million hours to index. This seems a little high to me. Anyone know how long it takes to index 1gb?
thanks

Unless you've having serious I/O performance problem (perhaps not even realizing it) your spotlight index wont take nearly as long as you might think. The first-time index usually takes a couple of hours. I see you have an older machine (dual G5) based on your signature. If that's the machine you're using then it could take a bit longer since the newer Intel CPUs are vastly faster -- but much of the time isn't CPU-bound but rather I/O bound (it'll slow you down but it wont slow you down that much).
You could be having an I/O problem and not realize it.
Things that would slow you down:
If you're using external (vs. internal) drives then the type of I/O might have a big impact.
Since you have an older Mac (G5) it's possible your USB is the older USB 1.1 (my PowerBook G4 only supported USB 1.1) and a disk connected via USB 1.1 would crawl.
External firewire drives are typically very fast but I've noticed that if you daisy-chain several Firewire devices together it can radically drop performance. If that's the case for you then I'd suggest disconnecting everything from the Firewire bus except the drives that need indexing while the index is happening.
If your drives are very full (e.g. 95% full or more) then the data may be fragmented and this can really slow you down depending on how bad it gets (I've seen it get so bad where I/O operations that should have taken 30 seconds were taking between 2 & 5 minutes -- that's quite a slow down). If your disks never get more than about 85% full then it's not a problem. The HFS filesystem on the Mac is pretty good about keeping itself relatively fragment-free as long as it's not packed too full. If your drives are full -- and have been running at near-full capacity for some time then you might want to invest in a defrag utility. If not then don't waste your money on a defrag utility as it wont help to any noticeable extent.
Most Macs can do the spotlight index in "a few hours" depending on the speed of the machine and how much data has to be indexed. You have an older Mac -- so expect it to be on the slow side, but maybe that might mean (and I'm making this up) 5 hours (give or take)... but it certainly wont be the millions of hours. You might want to let it index overnight. If it's not done (or at least mostly done) by the following morning, then I'd say you probably have a performance problem with your machine (e.g. slow I/O to your disks).

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 not Indexing (or showing any results)

Spotlight isn't working at all for me in Leopard. I had just done a format and clean install of Leopard, all apps and fully updated OS and apps patches. It's been 2 days now so I'd expect Spotlight would have indexed everything. However Spotlight returns no results for anything typed in the search box. Nothing.
Could the following be related? When I open Spotlight preferences>privacy and try to add ANY of my drives to the prevent list, it returns this error for all drives: "Privacy List Error. the item couldn't be added or removed because of an unknown error."

I fixed it and want to post what worked for anyone else with this problem. Spotlight would not return ANY result after the clean Leopard install. I cleaned out ALL the caches with the program Cocktail Leopard edition. That did the trick. Instantly Spotlight began indexing my drives. While I've used Cocktail for years I also found a program called "MainMenu" which has an actual button for "Re-index Spotlight". I didn't need it because Cocktail worked. But should cocktail not work for you I would try MainMenu next.

Spotlight keeps indexing in snow leopard

Spotlight keeps indexing for the last 2 weeks. I tsometimes has 45 mins till finishing, but when I check later, it still indexing without a estimate of time when it will finish. I have selected my ext. HD not to be index, but it still states it indexing my main HD. What can I do? I'm using 10.6.8. Also have 4 USB, 2 tb ext HD attachded. 2-to a usb hub and 2 -to the back of the imac. What can I do?
Austin

I had the same problems with spotlight that kept indexing. I solved them by using the following commands in the Terminal:
$ sudo rm -rf /.Spotlight-V100/*
$ sudo mdutil -i on -E /
As explained here:
http://guidovanoorschot.nl/how-to-fix-spotlight-when-it-keeps-indexing-n-mac-os- x-lion/

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.

Spotlight keeps indexing

hi,
The Time Capsule at work stopped taking backups of my machine on July,1. For my colleagues, it still works fine. I also noticed spotlight keeps trying to index the disk.
As a solution I removed the latest backup (indicated with 'inProgress' and I verified the disk with disk utility. I took 3 days, but mentioned no errors. I tried a couple of times to restart the backup, and now it finally seems to work again. Backup works (but very slow), however spotlight keeps indexing.
I already tried restarting the spotlight server, but it does not help. I tried other suggestions on the web but nothing seems to work...

See #D2 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).

Spotlight trouble indexing mail in Lion

Having a terrible time with Spotlight perpetually indexing mail.
system log shows
Jul 11 17:01:26 xxxxx com.apple.mdworker.lsb.0[2660]: [Assigning new unique identifiers to all messages]
Jul 11 17:01:26: --- last message repeated 249 times ---
and of course All messages shows every one of those.
also plenty of messages like
Jul 11 17:03:02 xxxxx com.apple.mdworker.lsb.0[2660]: %Unterminated mailbox: [email protected].
Jul 11 17:03:02 xxxxx com.apple.mdworker.lsb.0[2660]: %Unexpected characters at end of address: :;>
Jul 11 17:03:02 xxxxx com.apple.mdworker.lsb.0[2660]: %Unterminated mailbox: [email protected].
Jul 11 17:03:02 xxxxx com.apple.mdworker.lsb.0[2660]: %Unexpected characters at end of address: :;>
Jul 11 17:03:04 xxxxx com.apple.mdworker.lsb.0[2660]: %Missing parameter value: NAME
Jul 11 17:03:04 xxxxx com.apple.mdworker.lsb.0[2660]: %Missing parameter value: FILENAME
-- those seem to be ridiculous errors for Spotlight -- if it can't figure out how to parse some of the info, it should ignore that info.
This continues until the disk cache gets totally overloaded, and the machine slows down.
Only help is to reboot.
I have tried turning off spotlight indexing to delete the spotlight cache (and used Cocktail to delete the Spotlight index)
That was no help.
Also rebuilt all of the mailboxes within the Mail program.
Then turned indexing off and back on.
Still no help.
Just tried deleting a couple of old mailbox entries in ~/Library/Mail
There was an old Unix mailbox there from an early version of OS X, and another one that I could not identify, and should have been deleted long ago.
I know I can turn off the indexing for mail, but that is one area where I would like to keep it.
I haven't tried a reboot since the latest deletes, but seeing the same messages flowing in the logs does not give me much hope.
It may be possible that 1 or 2 bad emails are causing all the trouble, but I am at a loss to find them.
Have 18 different accounts that are active ( I do web work so have webmaster, and other accounts on a number of servers).
Those are a mix of IMAP and POP.
INBOX total is usually kept around 100 emails - almost never goes above 200 unless I am away for an extended time.
Most mail ends up in folders ON MY MAC.
Largest of those has about 1500 messages.
Do not have extra folders on the servers with any of the IMAP accounts.
It is about time I archive some of the older messages, and that may help, but it will take me a while to get to that, and then flush the messages.
Problem occurred after update to Lion.
Did not seem to have the problem with Snow Leopard
Anyone have any other ideas?

I thought I had posted a follow up to this posting, but I guess not.
Soooo, here it is.
The problem was not with Apple Mail.app as it seemed, but actually with Mailsmith.app.
I use it for a number of mail accounts that I want to handle separately from my other mail accounts.
Within that application there is a Spotlight helper/worker
-- /Applications/Mailsmith.app/Contents/Library/Spotlight/MailsmithImporter.mdimporter/ --
That is what was causing the problem for me.
Some users remove that section from the application, or do as I did -
Set the folders for Mailsmith mail for privacy in Spotlight.
Note: also set any backups of the Mailsmith mail for privacy also.
I filed a bug report with Mailsmith, but it is still open.
There appear to be a lot of issues with their Spotlight helper through the various versions of OS and Mailsmith.
see their discussion groups -
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!searchin/mailsmith-talk/spotlight$ 20indexing
The problem may be with certain emails, attachments, or addresses, don't know.
I am happy excluding that mail from Spotlight, and now my logs don't overflow and crash, the machine goes into deep sleep, and runs much cooler.

Spotlight is indexing, but no pulsing dot

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