Stopping Spotlight indexing your HD
November 23rd, 2008 in Mac OS |
Spotlight is a great technology, it may help you find any given file instantly, organize your information depending of your needs, but sometimes it screws us completely when it spends hours trying to index or renidex an already indexed mobile HD, causing us irritation and frustration when you can’t stop it from doing it… The easier and most reliable way to avoid any future indexing of your mobile HDs is to add it to the Privacy option in the Spotlight section of the System Preferences.
Here is quick step by step guide to solve to this headache:
1. Go to the System Preferences, usually on the Dock or on the Apple Menu on the upper left side of your Desktop.
2. Select Spotlight, the last icon on the first row, the Personal Section of your System Preferences.
3. At the Spotlight select Privacy
4. At the Privacy option select the “+” plus sign at the bottom, this Open a Browser window where you can select the Hard disc to stop from being indexed.
5. Violá. The disc is now selected and marked in the Privacy Section, this will help you stop Spotlight from spending hours trying to do what it has already done….
Now the hardest way…. You can turn off Spotlight completely using the Terminal, if you are not familiar with the Terminal please avoid this tutorial….
• Launch Terminal and type the following: sudo nano /etc/hostconfig
• Terminal will ask for your administrator password, you must type it and press Return
• Use your arrow keys down and go to the following entry: SPOTLIGHT=-YES-
• Change SPOTLIGHT=-YES- to SPOTLIGHT=-NO-
• Save /etc/hostconfig by hitting Control-O and the return key, next hit Control-X to exit the nano editor
• To disable the index type at the Terminal: sudo mdutil -i off /
• You could even delete the most recent Spotlight index, typing: sudo mdutil -E /
• The next time you turn on your mac Spotlight will be disabled.
To Enable Spotlight after a Disable
• In order to put Spotlight into working again you must follow the same steps, this time changing SPOTLIGHT=-NO- to SPOTLIGHT=-YES-
• Type sudo mdutil -i on / in the Terminal
• A reboot will turn everything on.
