Spotlight corruption

[David Polich]

Here's a little horror story and a happy ending to it.

I'm still on Tiger, OSX 10.4.11. Somehow, Spotlight got corrupted. This morning I noticed a file on my hard drive called "mds-crash-state". GetInfo just reported it as document that couldn't be opened. I tired everything to trash it, nothing worked. Everytime I dragged it into the trash, and emptied the trash, it would just reappear.

On top of this my hard disk was grinding away with lots of activity, although no apps were running.

I did a web search and found that "mds-crash-state" is a Spotlight-related file. If Spotlight is corrupted it keeps generating this file. Seeing as how I'm a bit scraed of typing anything in the Terminal (where you can disable Spotlight via sudo commands), I found two very helpful freeware apps.

"Cocktail" will disable Spotlight indexing, plus a bunch of other cool maintenace commands:

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/10909

"EasyFind" replaces the Finder search function, which slows to a crawl when you disable Spotlight indexing.

http://www.devon-technologies.com/products/freeware/

Once I disabled Spotlight indexing, I could trash the "mds-crash-state" file without it coming back.

I believe Spotlight works better in Leopard. I've always found it annoying at best in Tiger. Hope this info helps.

[monkey man]

Hey Dave, thank you for that.

I've always found Spotlight's knack for resource stealing when I least can afford it annoying at best.
FWIW, dragging all my partitions into the "do not search" window in Sys Prefs/Spotlight seems to have done the trick.

It's now the first thing I do when installing a new partition - nips it in the bud it seems, simply by leaving it nowhere to look.