Mac indexing external hard drive

After the third time through indexing the same data set see info above , I contacted Apple and got to their highest level of support - they were flabbergasted as well. They advised me to install yet another default But I did finally figure out that the first time mdworker stopped like that, the last file it touched was always in the same folder.

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I excluded that folder from spotlight search and the rest of the data set indexed within about 2 hours with no strange behavior or failures. I copied that folder to another machine and Spotlight barfed immediately.

Stopping Spotlight from Indexing Backups & External Drives from the Command Line

Exclude that folder and all is well again. I have no clue what is causing this behavior, still, but I did find a functional solution to the problem. Anyone with a similar problem - run opensnoop on all instances of mds and mdworker and wait patiently for wdworker to exit.

Look at the last file it touched and exclude the enclosing folder from being indexed.

I was able to repeat the issue and solution on 2 different installs and 2 different copies of the data set. It heated the laptop good so that was a problem. Tried leaving it on for hours, reindexing, adding to and then deleting from exceptions root.

Apparently the extension was constantly making changes in there. By clicking "Post Your Answer", you acknowledge that you have read our updated terms of service , privacy policy and cookie policy , and that your continued use of the website is subject to these policies. Home Questions Tags Users Unanswered. Spotlight Infinite Indexing issue external data drive Ask Question. It appears almost as thought it may not be the content but the quantity or specific combination of data that results in problems - use DataRescue to transfer the data to yet another newly formatted drive to expose any missed hidden files Between each of the above steps I stopped Spotlight search for anything beginning with md in Activity Monitor - All Processes and quitting it , deleted the.

So there it is. Anyone got any ideas? I have used the terminal command sudo opensnoop -p PID where PID is the mdworker process ID to try and determine what Spotlight is doing and hopefully find the files it's having trouble with. Here's what happens: I then proceeded to execute the same command on mds to see what it was doing and here's what I get, repeatedly: Questions - what happened to mdworker?

What is mds doing?

External hard drive not indexed by Spolight on Mac OS X Mountain Lion - Ask Different

Hope this helps. Thanks for ay attempts to help, M. Manca Weeks. Manca Weeks Manca Weeks 58 1 3 8. Hope that helps someone some day. Sign up or log in Sign up using Google. Sign up using Facebook. Sign up using Email and Password. Post as a guest Name. Spotlight, the automatic file index and search utility on your Mac, automatically indexes files on external drives for searching. When you connect an external hard drive to your computer, files on the drive should appear whenever you type the appropriate terms in the Spotlight field in the upper-right corner of a Finder window.

However, this may not be the case if the file index is damaged or if you have configured the Privacy option to prevent Spotlight from indexing the drive.

How to rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac

Remove the Privacy option -- or add it temporarily -- to force your Mac to re-index the contents of an external hard drive. Click the "System Preferences" icon on the Dock at the bottom or on the side of the screen. If you have removed the System Preferences icon, find it on the Apple menu; click the Apple logo in the top-left corner of the screen and select "System Preferences" on the pull-down menu. Click the "Privacy" tab at the top of the Spotlight window.

This list displays all of the locations that Spotlight is prohibited from searching. Click the name of your external hard drive on the list, and then click the "-" button at the bottom of the window. This allows your Mac to index the contents of the hard drive, which should now appear when you perform searches. If the external hard drive was not on the Privacy list, skip this step. A navigation window appears.