11-28-2007, 08:16 PM

I've had Leopard installed since the day it came out, but today all of the sudden it started randomly indexing my time machine drive and my other external hard drive. The time machine drive is just stuck at a spinning bar with "estimating indexing time" and my other drive has been stuck at about 3/4 the way done with "11 minutes remaining" displayed, the problem is it has said this for probably half the day, and I already restarted my computer and repaired permissions. Can anyone help?

11-28-2007, 09:12 PM

I added the backup drive to the "Privacy" settings for spotlight in system preferences in hopes that spotlight would just ignore it but I restarted and it's still trying to index it...:-/

11-28-2007, 10:26 PM

You can manipulate the spotlight indexer from the Terminal
http://developer.apple.com/documenta.../mdutil.1.html

For example,

sudo mdutil -i off (and then drag the drive icon into the Termainal window)

should turn the spotlight indexer off for that drive.

11-29-2007, 01:35 AM

After a restart it seems to be fine now....but if it starts up again I'll take your advice, thanks!

12-04-2007, 11:53 AM

So...both my externals have started to infinitely estimate indexing times once again...why on earth do they do that? If I do what technologist said are there any bad side effects I'll regret later?

12-04-2007, 01:07 PM

When I type this into terminal and drag the drive in I get "Error: unexpected indexing state." And my externals are still estimating indexing time...