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Apparently this is not an uncommon problem. Inexplicably, my MacPro1,1 is now perpetually indexing the drive for Spotlight. As soon as it completes it starts over. I've tried many "fixes" I've found on the net. I'm about ready to abandon the surgical approach and see if I can just reinstall Lion on the drive and hope that does something. Mr. Halloran, if you read this, do you have any wisdom on this issue. Unfortunately, Lion is the end of the road for this machine.

The usual procedure is to go into system preferences>Spotlight>Privacy and select the drives, folders, etc, you don't want indexed. Alternately, turning off Spotlight completely is also an option. No?

MIDI Life Crisis wrote:The usual procedure is to go into system preferences>Spotlight>Privacy and select the drives, folders, etc, you don't want indexed. Alternately, turning off Spotlight completely is also an option. No?

I was hoping there was another alternative to turning it completely off. I saw the suggestion to have it just not index your home folder, but that's where emails are and when I turned it off, I found I was unable to search content of old emails. Perhaps you can turn indexing off and it will use the last built index? Dunno.

There's this. I don't know if it finds emails, but I don't see why not.

http://apps.tempel.org/FindAnyFile/

MIDI Life Crisis wrote:There's this. I don't know if it finds emails, but I don't see why not.

http://apps.tempel.org/FindAnyFile/

Unfortunately, it looks like it doesn't. From the link...

If you search for content, such as in e-Mails, PDFs, Word docs etc., use Spotlight.

Bummer!

James Steele wrote:...Unfortunately, Lion is the end of the road for this machine.

Just curious, James. Have you considered an upgrade?

I've been checking out offerings here:

http://www.usedmac.com/products/Apple%2 ... &order=ASC

They've got some decent prices. A friend of mine picked up one of their used mac pros and has been very happy with it. I've been thinking of upgrading from my old quad core(1,1) currently running 10.6.8.

Phil

Hey Phil... this is my office machine that I use for day to day stuff. My studio machine is a MacPro4,1 that I upgraded to a 5,1 hexcore.

Well then, have you considered downgrading to 10.6.8. It's working great on my 1,1.

Phil

Phil O wrote:Well then, have you considered downgrading to 10.6.8. It's working great on my 1,1.

Phil

I just may do that. I wonder if it's a simple as just installing over Lion. Sigh. I already re-installed Lion in the hopes it clears it up. Seriously... I went months without any problems and this Spotlight issue pops up. Sigh.

I could never stop the perpetual indexing with Lion or the one before Yosemite. I even tried messing with Terminal commands from help forums to no avail

Yosemite was the only cure for me...

If you can't do a simple downgrade to 10.6.8, you can do a fresh install and use Migration Assistant or Time Machine to pull your files from a backup.

Weird that Spotlight is in a perpetual loop … or is it an Infinite Loop?

James Steele wrote:I just may do that. I wonder if it's a simple as just installing over Lion. Sigh. I already re-installed Lion in the hopes it clears it up. Seriously... I went months without any problems and this Spotlight issue pops up. Sigh.

Yeah, I had some problems with Lion as well. I'm pretty sure Spotlight was one of them. I basically did what Mike suggested (thanks, Mike) to get back to 10.6.8 and have remained there on that machine. Seems to be a better fit for the 1,1. I'd like to replace it eventually with something that can run Yosemite, though.

Philippe

Well looks like I solved it. In the Privacy tab of the Spotlight Prefs, you can exclude folders from being indexed. I pretty much excluded a bunch of folders that I really didn't need search results from, hoping most of all to retain indexing of folders that were most important to me, including where the Mail app stores messages. That seemed to do the trick.

MIDI Life Crisis wrote:The usual procedure is to go into system preferences>Spotlight>Privacy and select the drives, folders, etc...

Where have I heard that before?