Indexing LaCie 160 GB

Before you do or listen to anyone else, go to TheXLab:

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

Definitely well worth reading. And it will take you along way into solving your problem.

Best advice. Don't take anyones advice before you read this article.

Good luck.

How much ram do you have? How large and how full is the drive?

You asked for other advice. Mine is: don't take any other advice from people who tell you not to take any other advice.

Seriously though: my advice would be to ride with this thread to see what happens, and read other Spotlight threads.

This may give you an idea of the extent to which Spotlight is an unsatisfactory tool for finding stuff.

As an alternative may I suggest you download Easyfind and try it. It's freeware. Here's a link:

http://www.devon-technologies.com/download/index.html

but as soon as it is plugged in, the computer is running the index and blocking attempts to add it to privacy

Did you see the section of the FAQ that pointed out the anomalies from stopping indexing with Privacy on external volumes?

Check the FAQ again and try the instructions under "Disabling Spotlight Indexing while Indexing is in progress"

Also, you didn't say whether this drive moves between different computers, but if it is used only on OS X 10.4 systems, you could just let it index-it should only need to do it once.

The problem with external drives arises when moving between Spotlight and non-Spotlight systems. Externals are reindexed at a point when the last mounted time varies more than a specified threshold from the last index modification time. If the drive is used only on 10.4 systems, even if not the original system, the index will be updated normally since the index files are stored locally on the volume.

Spotless <http://www.fixamacsoftware.com/software/spot/index.php> is a shareware utility to turn off Spotlight indexing. You might give it a try.

bd

I am not sure what command you are referring to. Spotless allows you to disable Spotlight indexing on an individual volume, which is what I thought you were after.

bd

Maybe your drive is failing or the firewire interface on the Lacie is not working right. I had a 100GB Lacie where the firewire interface starting working intermittently and then failed altogether. It was causing random freezes as you describe when I tried to access it before complete failure

I removed the drive from the Lacie enclosure and bought a new enclosure. The drive works fine now.

iMac G5, PowerBook G4 Mac OS X (10.4)

I have a similar experience with a failing external firewire drive bringing my machine to it's knees.

Thanks for the tip on getting a new enclosure. I wonder if that is an option for my LaCie 400 GB USB/FW400/FW800?