Spotlight indexing external drive.

Question

Level 1

16 points

Spotlight indexing external drive.

All of a sudden, I've been having lots of trouble with my external hard drive, which has all of my iTunes media on it. I've had to reformat it twice, and repair permissions many times. I've also had iTunes lock up multiple times, and I've realized that it is because Spotlight is indexing my external drive. I've never noticed Spotlight doing this before, and it was never a problem. For example, it has currently said "Estimating indexing time" for about 5 minutes now. Meanwhile, I cannot use iTunes without it locking up and having to Force Quit (it takes multiple tries to Force Quit, also), and this is really becoming much more of a hassle than it ever needs to be. Spotlight also attempts to index the drive nearly every time I plug it in. How can I fix this without excluding the drive from Spotlight entirely? Is there a bigger cause to all this?

MacBook2,1, Mac OS X (10.5.7)

Posted on Dec 5, 2009 2:55 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Kappy

Level 10

362,007 points

Dec 5, 2009 3:13 PM in response to kibbles1053

Open Spotlight preferences, click on the Privacy tab, drag the disk icon for the external drive into the Privacy window. Indexing will cease. If you disconnect the drive then Spotlight will forget this when the drive is reconnected. Once you disable indexing Spotlight will not search the drive so you cannot use it to find items on that drive.

Perhaps you should just let Spotlight finish indexing the drive. Since your external drive does not have OS X installed on it there is not point in repairing permissions. Permissions are only repaired on system volumes and only system files/folders are repaired. What you want to try is repairing the drive, not permissions.

If you've reformatted the drive and still have a problem then it's quite possible you have one of the following problems:

1. The external drive is failing.
2. The Firewire interface in the external enclosure is defective or incompatible.
3. The Firewire port on the computer is defective.
4. You have a bad Firewire cable.
5. You have a dysfunctional OS X system.
6. The external drive is not correctly partitioned (should be GUID) and is not formatted Mac OS Extended, Journaled.
7. iTunes has a corrupted preference file or index file.
8. You have one or more bad files in the iTunes library.

Reply

Answer 2

kibbles1053 Author

Level 1

16 points

Dec 5, 2009 3:30 PM in response to kibbles1053

The problem was, it was taking forever to start indexing the drive, which I want it to do. My problem is that I've never noticed it before and it is interfering with my desire to run iTunes, the primary reason I have the drive in the first place. I have a feeling the drive is failing because it keeps "losing" music for no reason.

Reply

Answer 3

Kappy

Level 10

362,007 points

Dec 5, 2009 3:55 PM in response to kibbles1053

I should point out that you cannot repair permissions on a non-system volume nor repair non-system file/folder permissions. There is no point in repairing permissions on this volume. What you do need to do is:

Repairing the Hard Drive

Boot from your OS X Installer disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Installer menu (Utilities menu for Tiger and Leopard.) After DU loads select your hard drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and drive size) from the the left side list. In the DU status area you will see an entry for the S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard drive. If it does not say "Verified" then the hard drive is failing or failed. (SMART status is not reported on external Firewire or USB drives.) If the drive is "Verified" then select your OS X volume from the list on the left (sub-entry below the drive entry,) click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported, then quit DU and return to the installer. Now restart normally.

If DU reports errors it cannot fix, then you will need Disk Warrior and/or Tech Tool Pro to repair the drive. If you don't have either of them or if neither of them can fix the drive, then you will need to reformat the drive and reinstall OS X.

Don't overlook the possibility that the problem rests with iTunes or with your iTunes music folder content including the iTunes library index file.

Why do you keep the iTunes library on the external drive?

Reply

Answer 4

kibbles1053 Author

Level 1

16 points

Dec 10, 2009 6:22 PM in response to kibbles1053

At one point, my iTunes Library was so large it would not fit on my internal drive. Recently, I lost a large amount of items, so it now fits on my internal drive, although trying to recover everything I lost is becoming very very difficult. Also, my disc drive isn't reading DVD's, otherwise I would've resorted to the install DVD a long time ago. Thankfully, I should be getting a new drive within a week.

Reply

Answer 5

Jan 27, 2010 12:03 PM in response to kibbles1053

Because of an external hard drive crash, I've developed a theory that Spotlight under 10.5.8 has been trashing this particular Maxtor (yeah...I know...Maxtor drives are garbage historically) drive somehow. After testing my theory over the last 2 weeks (reformatting, reloading the files, and testing the drive on my other Macs with 10.4.11 and 10.5.7), CONSISTENTLY on the 2nd day of testing the drive with my 10.5.8, the drive gets trashed and cannot be recovered with DU, TechToolPro, or even DiskWarrior. Under 10.4.11 and 10.5.7 on the other Macs, the drive appears to perform normally and reliably.

Today I'm reformatting the drive again, but this time I'm making the drive "private" so that 10.5.8 Spotlight won't touch it. In a couple of days, I'll let Spotlight see the drive again and see what happens. I'll get back with the details within a week, but I'm putting my money on Spotlight 10.5.8 being the problem.

Reply

Answer 6

Feb 3, 2010 12:49 PM in response to Tom Oliver

OK...it's been a week and there have been no problems with the Maxtor drive since I "privatized" it. Tonight (after a backup), I'm going to allow Spotlight access to that drive again and see what happens...I suspect the drive will crash again, but let's see.

Also...after checking my pkg receipts, this problem seemed to crop up after I upgraded my Aluminum Keyboard to v1.1 and I remember reading somewhere on the net that someone was having USB-related problems on their Intel Mac after that particular upgrade...I can't find it anywhere now, but I'm 100% sure that I read it. Anyone read/see/hear something similar?

Reply