I received a bunch of reader suggestions in response to my
column this week (Pismo Spotlight and
Find Woes Persist with Latest Version of Tiger) about the issue
I had with Spotlight on my Pismo PowerBook refusing to index the
hard drive after I had (re)upgraded to OS X 10.4.
Happily, four correspondents zeroed in on the problem: My boot
partition, as well as my two other hard drive partitions, had
somehow gotten added to the "Privacy" list in the Spotlight
Preference panel.
In hindsight, that's something I should have checked first, but
in nearly two years of using Tiger, I don't recall ever having
added anything to the Privacy list (I do keep most categories
deselected in the Search Results pane).
Ah well, at least the mystery is solved. My Pismo is running
splendidly on OS X 10.4.8, and Spotlight now works. Thanks to
everyone who wrote!
RE: Pismo Spotlight and Find Woes
From Robert Emslie
Charles,
I read your article about Spotlight being a bit dim with your
Pismo. I had similar troubles (Pismo 500 MHz, 10.4.8) starting from
a couple of weeks ago, mainly because Mail.app refused to search
through my messages.
Having more urgent things at hand, I postponed the re-indexation
of the drive, which I'm doing now, the simple way, by dragging the
startup disk icon from the Desktop into the list in the System
Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy tab, then out of the list
again.
As a matter of fact, my startup disk was already listed in the
Privacy list; no wonder nothing registered in Spotlight....
This is maybe the most obvious fix for Spotlight issues, which
I'm sure you haven't overlooked, but I thought I'd remind you this
easy trick.
My 0.02 cents.
Cheers,
Robert Emslie
Hello Robert,
Sometimes the simplest things.
Duhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
All three of my hard drive partitions were in the
"Privacy" pane. I deleted them from there, and indexing commenced
forthwith. How they came to be in there is an abiding mystery. I
didn't do it manually.
Did you ever figure out how your startup disk got
added to the list?
Thanks muchly for the tip. I often learn as much
(or more) through writing these columns as my readers do.
Charles
Spotlight on Your Pismo
From Michael Stevens
Dear Sir,
I just read your column on Low End Mac dated 2007.03.12, in
which you talk about Spotlight not working on your Pismo. I'm one
of the developers of an academic literature management product
called Sente, which supports Spotlight searching of its database,
and I've had to learn a few things about Spotlight's innards. I
have some suggestions that you might not have run across yet.
1) Spotlight privacy settings
The Spotlight preferences panel has a tab labeled Privacy, which
contains a list of folders - or entire volumes - that Spotlight is
not allowed to index. Even if your main disk isn't on this list, it
might be worth adding it to the list, completely exiting System
Preferences, and then taking it back off the list. Doing so will
force Spotlight to discard any indexing information it had about
the volume, then rebuild it from scratch. This has brought
Spotlight back from the dead for me more than once on an external
disk.
2) File system (volume) format
Spotlight won't index some formats of file systems. For
instance, it won't do anything with my FAT16-formatted USB keychain
drive. If you do a Get Info on your main disk, and the Format field
says anything other than "Mac OS Extended," that might be the
problem.
3) CPU load
The mds (metadata service) program, which carries out the
indexing, is always lurking in the background under 10.4. It tries
to stay out of your way, though, and usually won't run unless it
can get a good chunk of the CPU to itself. If you have something
heavyweight running constantly, like an animated desktop or screen
saver, mds may never even try to run.
I hope one of these ideas helps. Good luck!
Best regards,
Michael Stevens
Hi Michael,
It did. Your first suggestion proved the
charm.
Thanks so much for the insights and advice.
Charles
Pismo Spotlight Help
From Darren
I think this link should give you some insight into your Pismo
Spotlight problems:
<http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/stopspotlightindex.html>
I would suggest that you pay particular attention to the section
"Stopping Spotlight indexing", as it has a number of steps for
restarting the indexing process of a volume if its index is
corrupted. It reads as if the corruption can survive a reinstall of
OS X, so your switch back to Panther and subsequent reinstall
of Tiger probably would not clear the corrupt index.
Obviously, check out the System Preferences > Spotlight >
Privacy tab to make sure that your drive isn't listed.
Hope that helps . . . let us know how it goes.
Darren
Hi Darren,
As you say, "obviously...." Unfortunately, it
never occurred that it could be something so rudimentary.
The problem did turn out to be just that - my
three hard drive partitions had somehow been added to the "Privacy"
pane in the Spotlight preference panel (unless I'm farther gone
than I imagine, I didn't put them in there, and nobody else uses
this computer. Weird.
Thanks for the link to that resource - an
excellent and thorough tutorial on Spotlight management that I will
keep for future reference and referral.
Charles
Spotlight Issues
From Tre Cowan
Charles,
I just read your article on the Spotlight issues, and forgive me
if this is something you already looked at, but are your Spotlight
preferences set to ignore the hard drive itself? In the privacy
section, I routinely turn off Spotlight indexing for my external
and flash drives, but if they have the same name as the
internal/boot drive, it can get stuck on that.
Since you didn't mention this . . . my 2¢. Good
luck! I enjoy your articles.
Thanks,
Tre
Hello Tre,
No, I didn't mention it, alas, because it never
occurred to me, but you nailed it.
Thanks, and thanks for reading.
Charles
Pismo Spotlight and Find Woes Persist with Latest Version of
Tiger
From Chris Apa
Mr. Moore,
Perhaps you have already ruled this out, but what of the
possibility that the G4 upgrade is in someway messing with you?
My G3 500 MHz with 640 MB RAM has been happily running every
version of OS X since Beta, with it's current OS of
10.4.8.
It's no speed demon, as I am sure you understand. Spotlight
works as expected, as does everything minus some fancy effects like
Fast User Switching, disabled by my meager 8 MB VRAM.
Just my experience though, yours may differ.
I have enjoyed your writing for many years, thank you.
Regards,
Chris
Hi Chris,
Thanks for the insight.
I had pondered whether the G4 upgrade is somehow
the cause of an incompatibility, but the odd thing was that
Spotlight worked fine for the first eight months I had Tiger
installed on this machine.
Thanks for reading.
Charles
Spotlight
From Christoph Trusch
Hello Charles,
Regarding your Spotlight problem that survived various clean
installs: First I would try to create a fresh user account and look
if Spotlight works in there. If so, there is a problem with your
preferences, which - if they were dragged over from older installs
- would explain the persistence (or whatever you call this in
English) of the problem.
Sadly, this suggestion is the only one I have, and to be honest,
I can't think of any other reason why this misbehavior would have
survived clean installs.
Best regards,
Christoph Trusch
Hi Cristoph,
Good suggestion, and that's what I'd have tried
next.
Charles
Spotlight Fix
From Alan Wood
All you have to do is use a utility like invisibles to make all
those hidden files appear. Then delete the Spotlight index files,
which will look like VT100 or something similar. Use the utility to
make the hidden files invisible again. Restarts and let Spotlight
finish indexing and you should be back in business.
Alan
Thanks for the tip Alan, As you've read above, the
problem turned out to be something astonishingly simple
Charles
Spotlight Problems
From Robert Crane
Mr. Moore;
I had installed OS 10.4.8 in an iBook G3 384 MB RAM. Things were
fine for a long while then I started getting very long spinning
ball waits. I Googled around and found 2 things.
- Hard Disc free space for paging should equal 7x RAM size. I was
down to 1.5 G free ( 20G drive) so I freed HD space back up to
2.5G.
- I Googled Spotlight and found that it is known to sometimes
launch more than 1 process. Using the Activity monitor I killed
both the user Spotlight Process and the System Spotlight
process.
- Then I did a cold shut down and cold reboot.
- No more problems.
Robert Crane
Thanks, Robert.
The problem turned out to be something
astonishingly simple - my three hard drive partitions had somehow
been added to the "Privacy" pane in the Spotlight preference
panel.
For the record, hard drive free space could
certainly be something to consider if Spotlight plays up. I have
4.5 MB free on my boot partition (25 GB), which is getting a bit
tight for OS X, but not critical yet.
Charles
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