Spotlight is indexing for ages!

Hi there!
I have a MacBook Pro, EY2011, and I recently installed a fresh copy of Mountain Lion, as my old copy was pretty much junked up. Now, the problem is that Spotlight has been rumbling around for ages, and I can only look for existing indexed files. No new files at all. The fans just go up and down and up and down. Left it on last night. Worst sleep. Ever.
Now, it says 6 days remaining. I am not very happy, as I need my laptop for school, and I bought a MacBook not only because they look good, but also because they seemed quiet and have solid performance. And the thing with the quiet, well in a classroom, with 20 people, and everybody being quiet, theres my hurricane, I mean laptop, going away at 5000 to 6200 rpm.
Now, all I am getting is constant revving up of the fans thanks to spotlight, the Spotlight Indexing Process, 'mds', and a CPU where 60 percent of the performance goes to a 'dead' spotlight.
Now, I'm wondering, is there anyway to fix this. I have tried using this command sudo rm -rf /.Spotlight-V100/*, however, it has changed nothing.
PLEASE HELP!
Thanks a lot in advance,
Max

I installed iOS 6 on my iPad 2 yesterday as well as the above stuff if that helps.
Ta.

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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?
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Spotlight keeps indexing in snow leopard

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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 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?
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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.
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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.
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How do I stop the indexing on my MacBook Pro? It's been indexing for 2 days.

How do I stop the indexing on my MacBook Pro? It's been indexing for 2 days.

Step 1
These instructions must be carried out as an administrator. If you have only one user account, you are the administrator.
Triple-click anywhere in the line below on this page to select it:
syslog -F '$Time $Message' -k Sender mdworker -o -k Message Rne Norm -k Sender mds | tail | pbcopy
Copy the selected text to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C.
Launch the built-in Terminal application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad and start typing the name.
Paste into the Terminal window by pressing the key combination command-V. I've tested these instructions only with the Safari web browser. If you use another browser, you may have to press the return key after pasting.
The command may take a noticeable amount of time to run. Wait for a new line ending in a dollar sign ($) to appear.
The output of the command will be automatically copied to the Clipboard. If the command produced no output, the Clipboard will be empty. Paste into a reply to this message.
The Terminal window doesn't show the output. Please don't copy anything from there.
If any personal information appears in the output, anonymize before posting, but don’t remove the context.
Step 2
Enter the following command as in Step 1 and post the output:
mdutil -as 2>&- | pbcopy
You can then quit Terminal.
Step 3
Launch the Console application in the same way you launched Terminal. In the Console window, look under the heading DIAGNOSTIC AND USAGE INFORMATION on the left for crash reports related to Spotlight. If you don't see that heading, select
View ▹ Show Log List
from the menu bar. A Spotlight crash report has a name beginning in "mds" or "mdworker" and ending in ".crash". Select the most recent such report, if any, from the System and User subcategories and post the entire contents—the text, please, not a screenshot. In the interest of privacy, I suggest that, before posting, you edit out the “Anonymous UUID,” a long string of letters, numbers, and dashes in the header of the report, if it’s present (it may not be.)
Please don’t post any other kind of diagnostic report, such as hang logs—they're very long and not helpful.

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

How can I stop Spotlight from indexing external drives?

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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
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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:
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Note: press option+return with your keyboard... the box will appear blank
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Note: If the comments are all on one line, the whole line will be visible in the collapsed view under the Film Roll name
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Open Terminal (in the Utilities folder)
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* 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
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- 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]"
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- 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'
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- Click iPhoto in the menu bar, and go to Preferences
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- Select the Keywords tab
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- UNCHECK the box that says [Spotlight] * THIS MIGHT TAKE A WHILE
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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

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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.
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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:
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Welcome to Darwin!
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