Spotlight could crash and wipe your partition

[thrunner]

There are many who are enamored with the Spotlight search function in Mac OSX, thinking that it is a magical search function that takes no time and no effort. However, it could take a lot of time indexing and it does this without prompt and you may not be able to shut it down or shut down the system while it doing this.

 

I know there are discussions about this if you search the forum, about shutting off Spotlight by going to System Preferences, Spotlight, Privacy and pick a partition or location you don't want Spotlight to search. However, there are problems with this:

 

1. If you forgot to do this and the indexing got started, you may not be able to go to the Spotlight setting and pick that location anymore. You can try to drag that folder/location and OSX won't let you.

 

2. If the indexing really got started on a large partition (your WinXP for example), you may not be able to stop the indexing process. You are stucked with constant disk accessing and no prompt telling you what is going on.

 

3. Once this indexing starts, you maynot be able to do a system shut down. It will just hang with disk access continuing and no menu, no Finder, no way to get to the terminal to do some sudo mojo.

 

#3 is what happened to me and I just gave up and powered off by switch after about 20 minutes of hanging disk access- that was my mistake. On the next boot, Mac OSX then booted to a memory error and no safe mode either, no easy way of recovery built into OSX. Luckily I had a recent Acronis True image backup and my WinXP partition was still bootable and I could restore the OSX partition fairly rapidly.

 

 

The moral of the story is: Spotlight comes with a cost and if you don't know what is going on, you can get wiped out. If OSX is so friendly, I think it would at least tell you what is going on. I didn't even know this was a Spotlight problem until I did a lot more readling.

 

There is a terminal sudo way of stopping Spotlight once it got started and here is a good URL to that:

http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/stopspotlightindex.html

 

 

Disabling Spotlight indexing while indexing is in progress

 

Adding a volume to Privacy while it is being indexed is not the best method for stopping the indexing of that volume. Instead, we recommend the following:

 

1. Let indexing begin on the volume.

2. Launch Terminal, which is in the Computer > Macintosh HD > Applications > Utilities folder.

3. At the prompt, type the following command, exactly as written:

1. sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/volume_name

4. where volume_name is the name of the volume being indexed. [1]

5. Press Return.

6. If prompted for a Password, type your Admin password, then press Return. You will receive the response:

1. /Volumes/volume_name/: Indexing disabled for volume.

7. Spotlight will immediately cease to index the specified volume.

8. At the Terminal prompt, type the following command, exactly as written:

1. sudo mdutil -E /Volumes/volume_name

9. where volume_name is the name of the volume being indexed. [1]

10. Press Return.

11. If prompted for a Password, type your Admin password, then press Return. You will receive the response:

1. /Volumes/volume_name/: Volume index removed.

12. At the Terminal prompt, type exit then press Return.

13. Quit (Command-Q) Terminal.

[ozzie123]

Hey thanks for this help! I think my spotlight is trying to index the whole system now. Lucky me, I haven't "hard reboot".

 

Thanks again

[alc0h0lic]

Thx for posting your experience with spotlight.

 

I'm using spotlight on a 2x250gb HFS+ setup and I never catched spotlight indexing something like google desktop does or msn desktop search does. My idea of spotlight is that it modifies its dbase on every filesystem event and not regularly scanning your whole disk (like gds & mds), perhaps this doesn't work on NTFS partitions.

[dkelley]

Thx for posting your experience with spotlight.

 

I'm using spotlight on a 2x250gb HFS+ setup and I never catched spotlight indexing something like google desktop does or msn desktop search does. My idea of spotlight is that it modifies its dbase on every filesystem event and not regularly scanning your whole disk (like gds & mds), perhaps this doesn't work on NTFS partitions.

 

The first time you run OSX it will index everything in the background (ala google desktop search). That can take hours, even with no documents of your own created yet.

 

From then on it does what you're suggesting - indexing on every filesystem event (ok, that's my layman's understanding of it anyway, no doubt it doesn't do it on EVERY filesystem event, but you get the drift).

 

I have a 200g sata osx drive, a 200g ntfs winxp drive, and an external usb2 200g ntfs winxp data drive. spotlight hasn't been a problem on my system (after the initial few hours of letting the computer sit idle so it could index everything, should be standard practice on all new mac osx installs). Spotlight didn't index my ntfs drives, I don't think it knows how to index ntfs. So I wouldn't worry about your windows partitions unless they're on something other than ntfs.

 

PS - even during initial indexing I had no trouble rebooting or anything, just that cpu and disk usage was constantly at 80% until it was done (so a tiny bit slow in performance, but still useable).

 

dkelley

[antrunix]

The first time you run OSX it will index everything in the background (ala google desktop search). That can take hours, even with no documents of your own created yet.

 

It took 15 minutes each time after a fresh install. And now everything is clean. Once I even power off my PC while Spotlight was doing this and then after It tried again and finished all fine. I use 10.4.3 8f1111A with no SSE3 CPU.

[dkelley]

It took 15 minutes each time after a fresh install. And now everything is clean. Once I even power off my PC while Spotlight was doing this and then after It tried again and finished all fine. I use 10.4.3 8f1111A with no SSE3 CPU.

 

15 minutes??? holy cow... it probably took me much longer because I wouldn't let my hackintosh sit idle for more than 2 seconds before I got anxious and played with it again LoL. So 4 hours for people with no patience like me, 15 minutes if you're smart and let it go idle (at least for antrunix, above).

 

A watched kettle never boils...

[blackentangled]

If OSX is so friendly, I think it would at least tell you what is going on. I didn't even know this was a Spotlight problem until I did a lot more readling.

 

and i assume that you're doing this on a hackintosh? obviously, why did i ask... if you like osx to be friendly then consider yourself buying a real mac which works accordingly.

[thrunner]

and i assume that you're doing this on a hackintosh?

This is not platform specific: http://www.macintouch.com/readerreports/ma.../topic3151.html

CB Cooke

I've encountered an extremely serious problem with Mac OS-X 10.42's Spotlight feature that I think your readers should be aware of. It has destroyed one and possibly two of my external FireWire 400 hard drives. Here's how my story goes...

If you install any unconventional storage device for OSX Spotlight to index, beware of stopping the indexing and do so properly. BTW, being critical of some feature of an OS doesn't have to turn into something disagreeable. We should all be great supporters of OSes from MS, Apple, Linux etc when they work properly.

[blackentangled]

ok, my bad. thanks for backing up the info, it will surely help alot of us to be aware.