"Help, MDS keeps crashing!" -> Solved.

Dear Apple Friends,

I thought I should submit this solution just in case anyone else was experiencing it.

If you notice MDS (Spotlight) crashing periodically in your Console logs, the solution is to rebuild your spotlight indexes.

Anecdote: I noticed multiple, periodic MDS crash failures (Segmentation Faults) that would appear randomly. Rebuilding the Index solved most of them but I still found crash logs for MDS. I came to the conclusion that whenever I plugged in my Time Machine HDD to backup, more crashes would appear. Thus, rebuilding simply the Index for your Mac's internal HDD is only part of the solution; you have to do it for your Time Machine and/or other HDDs that you use if they are corrupted as well.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2409

In my case, I recently had a logic board failure. Apple replaced the logic board and OS X was booting/operating just fine except I noticed random MDS crash logs--something I had never seen before the logic board failure. I reinstalled OS X but they still kept appearing until I rebuilt the spotlight Index for my Time Machine HDD.

It is my hope this will be of some use to someone else who is trying to track down the reason for MDS crash logs in their Console database.

Cheers,

John