Lion Spotlight Re-Indexes Each Time I Restart Computer

I would like to follow Bob_H and Psi's instructions, but I found that I'm missing the following 2 files:

com.apple.spotlight.plist.lockfile

com.apple.spotlight.plist

All I was able to find in my Prefs folder were the following:

com.apple.systemuiserver.plist

com.apple.systemuiserver.plist.lockfile

Anyone else have this problem - a lack of spotlight.plist files?

They should be there - the indexer is going about its (annoying) process of completely reindexing my hard drive every time I restart....

Whoever said this was beginning to resemble a Microsoft scenario was dead on....

I, too, have experienced the following:

- frequent dropping of my wireless router's signal

- mail quitting unexpectedly

- occasional inability to send mail (mail can't talk to the mobile me smtp server)

Not what I signed up for.

I'm seeing the same thing. Missing com.apple.spotlight.plist files and Spotlight is kicking in on every restart. i thought that it might be a permissions issue, but Disk Utility didn't find anything. I'm running 10.7.1 and I don't recall this issue when I was running 10.7.0, but then I hardly ever reboot my Mac. Seems to have kinda cropped up when I started running Parallels 7, but I don;t think the two are related. I'm gonna try to remove just the com.apple.systemuiserver.plist and see what happens.

I can report that all the problems I reported here were resolved by disabling and the uninstalling Intego Virus Barrier. I have the last version of VMWare Fusion installed, but that does not seem to cause problems in Lion with IVB gone.

Just wanted to chime in and say Me Too. Spotlight under Lion begins reindexing my entire drive every single time i reboot. The entire drive - and it takes hours... slowing everything down. I have tried turning spotlight on and off - nothing works. Glad to see so many other people having the exact same problem - let's hope someone in Apple is monitoring this thread. Someone may want to file this bug with apple: https://bugreport.apple.com

I'm having the very some problem.

I've tried:

* sudo mdutil /on off (deleting some pfiles also in the process after seeing that nothing happens)

* sudo mdutil /E

* tweaking Spotlight options to look for less things

* reinstall Lion

To no solution. The best solution seems to deactivate Spotlight, and doing search using terminal + find command, that's maybe better than spotlight for file searches.

Anyone knows how to monitor what Spotlight is doing?

I've also did a bug report to Apple. At the moment, Bootcamp with XP is the best use I have for my macbook pro, late 2009.

😟😠

Same thing here. I've tried all the solutions posted here and nothing works, even updating to 10.7.2 😟

Well, it seems I've find my solution. My issue could be that Bootcamp with XP is not so OK with Lion, I´ve updated to Lion but not to WIN7 yet, and then, after excluding my bootcamp disk from Spotlight there is no more reindexing every time I power on my computer.

I´ve also tried using onyx utility, but it seems that the issue is with Bootcamp disk. Also, I´ve found some useful documentation when looking for mds / mdutil in the web, and used the console to look at the messages, but no one was talking about "exclusion of Bootcamp" from Spotlight, as far as I remember.

Warning for other people: after reformatting the disk to Lion TimeMachine deleted all my old backups to re-save the last backup I had done (TM disk: 1tb, full backup: 550, then the "rewrite"). I hope I did not lost anything useful, but I've lost the history.

Good for me!

Spotlight's insistence on re-indexing after every reboot has been driving me nuts for about six weeks. It brought my machine to its knees. Early 2010 MBP, 2.66GHz, 8GB RAM, Seagate Momentus XT 500GB drive running SD28 firmware, OS X Lion 10.7.4, no Boot Camp partition.

I tried the terminal tricks referenced in this and other threads to reset Spotlight's index:

Turn indexing off for /

sudo mdutil -i off /

Clear the metadata store for /

sudo mdutil -E /

Turn indexing back on for /

sudo mdutil -i on /

...No help. (Took its sweet time, too.)

I ran Disk Utility and found some errors on my drive. Rebooted in the Recovery Partition and used Disk Utility there to fix them.

...No help.

Finally I began to suspect that the issue's onset may have coincided with my installation of Sophos' free antivirus utility for the Mac in the days after the Flashback kerfuffle. Now, I'd turned off Sophos' on-access scanning after initially scanning my disk, but given others' warnings about Intego's antivirus utility, I wondered if Sophos might have been contributing to this issue somehow. So I uninstalled it (using the uninstaller app that Sophos provided), and rebooted.

AND IT WORKED.

No re-indexing! No glacial performance affliction for eons after restarting!

It's early yet, so we'll just have to see if subsequent reboots also go well. But this is the first reboot in weeks that hasn't had me gnashing my teeth in frustration.

I have noticed a lot of blame befalling XP bootcamp, and I've got Windows 7 boot camp. And there's a lot of blame on various antivirus manufacturers, and I have never installed one (isn't that one of the main benefits of being on mac? I am rarely exposed to risk because I never have to install anything?).

Unfortunately I'm still getting this issue and it's really upsetting me, I'm unaccustomed to my mac even requiring a reboot except when I've abused it, now it's acting up and a reboot only makes it slower for 2 hours? This is absurd.

Will try fix and report back, but wanted to join the frustrated chorus.

I did a slight modification to the above instructions on a MacbookPro upgraded to Lion that exhibited this same problem.

In my case, I had "several" iterations of the pref file com.apple.systemuiserver.plist. I had at least a dozen or so variations of this particular plist file going back 3 years. I copied them all to the backup folder just in case.

Made copies of the plist files identified below (including all file name variations) then deleted them from that location and restarted the computer.

I kept backups in the folder on my desktop for a couple of time machine backups beore deleting them--in case I needed to restore them in the future.

Two weeks since and haven't a single problem w/Spotlight indexing as before.

Here are the steps I followed:

1 - Create a Folder on your desktop to save files from step #2 below:

2 - Copy the following files from this location:

~/Library/preferences

com.apple.systemuiserver.plist**

com.apple.spotlight.plist.lockfile

com.apple.spotlight.plist

3 - After making copies of the files and confirming you have them, delete them from the ~/Library/preferences folder.

4 - Empt the trash, then reboot.

5 - If you had Indexer turned off, turn it back on from a terminal session

5 Open the Terminal Application, then use the following commands to turn indexing back on using "sudo" (requires admin password).

sudo mdutil -i on /

Let the Indexes build--can take some time depending on speed of your computer.

This worked for me. Thank you very much!!! After restart it started to index, and I despaired. But after a minute or so it stopped. Ordinarily it would index for an hour or so. Sometimes longer. Full disclosure, I also put my Bootcamp drive in Private, but that did not work by itself. And I am still running Sophose on access scanning, without any trouble.