Spotlight Problem?

[Hoplite]

I've noticed over the past couple of months that a process called mds or mdimport will run my cpu at 100% for days if I don't quit it. I think I;ve narrowed it down to being owned by Spolight. When it's running I can't eject my iPod, I assume since it's trying to catalog it, and moving files and folders under the private category doesn't seem to work. I've done all I can think of thus far minus a reinstall or a clean install.

Any help is appreciated.

I'm running 10.4.10 on a Quicksilver (2000) 867 with 1.5 gb of ram.

[Giaguara]

So did I get it right, you tried this? : In System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy > drag your hard drive to the list, and remove it from the list after a few seconds.
(will cause Spotlight to force index its contents - so it would show if it had any effect when the indexing is finished, in 10-20 minutes.)


You can turn off Spotlight by editing /etc/hostconfig to change "SPOTLIGHT=-YES-" to "SPOTLIGHT=-NO-".

Or modify /etc/hostconfig to read:

SPOTLIGHT=-NO-

Then to get rid of the existing index, run these two commands from Terminal:

mdutil -i off /

mdutil -E /

The first command disables indexing on the boot volume, and the second erases the existing template. You can then use Activity Monitor to kill any mds or mdimport processes or else just reboot.

And to re-enable Spotlight later again,

SPOTLIGHT=-YES-
in /etc/hostconfig,

in Terminal:

mdutil -i on /

and reboot.

[Mikuro]

To use mdutil, you must precede it with "sudo". So the commands Giagura posted become:

sudo mdutil -i off /

sudo mdutil -E /

sudo mdutil -i on /

"sudo" will ask you for an administrator's password and then run the mdutil command as the root user, which is necessary for mdutil to work.

Generally, simply erasing the database with "sudo mdutil -E /" is enough to fix it (at least in my experience). That will cause OS X to start rebuilding the database from scratch, which might take a few hours.

If you want to manipulate the Spotlight database of a volume besides your boot volume (your iPod, for instance), you will need to replace the / in those commands with "/Volumes/your_volume_name".

[Hoplite]

Thanks for the help. That fixed it right away. Spotlight is doing now what it never properly did before, give fast results.