Time Machine hang- Waiting for Index to become available (100)

Question

Hi- I'm trying to create a new Time Machine backup to a new external HD (FW800). I've formatted the drive as Mac OS Extended and told TM to use this as the backup drive. I should note that I've done TM backups in the past with a different drive which was a USB2.0 drive, but just got this FW800 and thought it would be much faster to use.
Anyway, now I'm getting the dreaded 'Waiting for Index to become available (100)' message from the TM buddy widget. This keeps repeating every few seconds. I let it run overnight and about 14 hours later, TM backed up 6G from a 150G total. As I watched the backup run, it's copying over about 1M every few minutes. How can this be? I've read through some of the forum entries and I tried placing the external drive in the Spotlight exclusion, and I also uninstalled any traces of Norton that I had installed. Nothing is making this backup go any faster.
So why in the past, has the first backup run fairly quickly, and now this is running like it will take several days to complete?
Please- any help will be greatly appreciated!! thanks.

Answer 1

BrianMBM wrote:
As far as the communication issue, the external drive mounts just fine, and I can access it in the finder, so I don't believe physical connection is the culprit here.
Not necessarily. A marginal connection may work, but with lots of retries, resulting in things being quite slow. It's fairly rare, but can happen.
I just don't understand why just months ago, the first TM backup started right away and now this is taking forever- Is this a change that was released in an update from Apple in how TM works?
No. In fact, they're supposed to be somewhat faster on Snow Leopard.
How can I delete every trace of previous TM backups and completely start from scratch?
You can erase the drive. If you're going to do that anyway, you might as well reformat it, with the GUID *Partition Map Scheme.* APM should work fine, but if you ever want to use it as a boot drive, GUID is preferred for an Intel Mac.
There's obviously something that's causing this indexing thing to take so long that's never happened in the past.
Try the reformat. (You'll probably have to exclude it from Spotlight again.)
Is it a multi-interface drive? If so, try connecting via USB temporarily.
If that doesn't help, try just copying a large file or folder and see how fast it is. If that's slow, too, you know it isn't Time Machine but something else associated with your F/W card, port, cable, or drive.