Timemachine stuck preparing in 10.5.2

I had been doing backups using Timemachine just fine before the update to 10.5.2. I had tried to repartition my external drive to limit the amount of space time machine would take up. Trying it on 10.5.1 didn't work, gave an error "no space left on device", even though there's 90 gig free. I then updated to 10.5.2. I get the same error. I tried splitting the free space, this time I got a kernel panic. Argh!
I had to use disk util to repair the external drive. It says everything is ok now.
I've never run Timemachine with 10.5.2. Now when I try, it gets stuck and says "Preparing". Forever. backupd stops doing anything.
In the console I get
2/12/08 12:23:05 PM /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[295] Waiting for index to be ready (915 > 0)
I check with spotlight, "mdutil -as". It says indexing it turned off for my external drive, but on for the time machine backup directory. I can't turn it on for the drive overall. When I try to turn it on, it comes back and says its off.
Any ideas whats wrong or how to get around it? I don't know if Timemachine just isn't working in 10.5.2 anymore or if the partition is somehow messed up.
Ideas?
Message was edited by: dm33

i used the /.metadataneverindex trick to disable spotlight on my time machine drive.
removed that file, reindexed the drive, time machine picked up and backupd started backing up.
can someone file a bug? i don’t have a rdar account.
(i added the time machine drive to my spotlight privacy preferences so it wouldn’t be indexed. probably not necessary for the fix to work.)

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Try doing a verify of the backup and source disk.
A5 here.
http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html
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My Time Capsule is stuck "preparing".

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