Spotlight is repeatedly re-indexing

mrlunchmrlunch
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
I have a three week old 20" iMac 2.4 running Leopard w/ 1 gig of RAM. Ever since I installed Leopard (few days after purchase) Spotlight is repeatedly re-indexing. It's not very loud but I can hear the drive and it's constantly working.



For the time being I put the whole hard drive in the "privacy" tab in Spotlight preferences just to stop the drive from constantly working. By doing this I basically disables Spotlight.



Any ideas how to fix this?



Looks like I'm not the only one with this issue. From Apple support forums: Spotlight is repeatedly re-indexing But no real fix.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 4
    mrlunchmrlunch Posts: 2member
    Nothing huh? Looks like I will backup everything and do a clean install. It appears to be my last and only choice.
  • Reply 2 of 4
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,515moderator
    There are various terminal commands for interacting with Spotlight. If you type man mdutil, it will return some options and also links to other commands like mdfind, mdimport.



    You need to run these commands as root so for example to erase your Spotlight storage and try building from the start again, you would type:



    sudo mdutil -E /



    This will start your indexing from scratch and maybe it will stop re-indexing when it finishes.
  • Reply 3 of 4
    cnuco2007cnuco2007 Posts: 73member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by mrlunch View Post


    I have a three week old 20" iMac 2.4 running Leopard w/ 1 gig of RAM. Ever since I installed Leopard (few days after purchase) Spotlight is repeatedly re-indexing. It's not very loud but I can hear the drive and it's constantly working.



    For the time being I put the whole hard drive in the "privacy" tab in Spotlight preferences just to stop the drive from constantly working. By doing this I basically disables Spotlight.



    Any ideas how to fix this?



    Looks like I'm not the only one with this issue. From Apple support forums: Spotlight is repeatedly re-indexing But no real fix.



    Something else to check as well is your spolight preferences and what it is indexing. Make sure it is not indexing your backup drive I like to think it will automatically ignore the time machine backup drive but i'm not totally sure. Just throwing out ideas good luck
  • Reply 4 of 4
    teedoff087teedoff087 Posts: 348member
    I can vouch for that. It tried to index both of my external drives. I don't need results for duplicate files on a backup drive. That's what Time Machine is for.
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