# Spotlight hangs, drive corruptions and lockups



## smslavin (Feb 20, 2008)

I've posted this in several other forums today to no avail. Hopefully someone here can help me.

I've just installed 10.5 and the .2 update in the past couple of days. Everything was working okay and then it appeared that Spotlight started to hang on something. Once it started hanging, weird things started to happen with my drives. As a professional photographer, my drives are my life and when weird things start to happen, I get a little freaked out.

Yesterday, a message popped up saying something like the volume was corrupt and I should backup and reformat. Last night, everything pretty much stopped working. Any access to that volume caused the machine to completely lock up. Spotlight was saying, and still is, that there are a little over 2 million hours left to index.

I've booted off the 10.5 DVD and ran disk utility. My main drive had a bunch of errors that the repair supposedly fixed. The drive that had the reformat error was also repaired. If it's any help, that drive is 3 1TB drives concatenated together and I use it to store all of my RAW files.

I then booted off the DiskWarrior CD and checked all of my drives. My main boot drive was about 50% out of order. DiskWarrior took about 14 hours to rebuild the index.

Today, I've disconnected all FW drives. Spotlight is still hanging. I came across this article: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6549890

I've run the command "lsof | grep mdworker" and received the following response from Terminal:

lsof: WARNING -- child proces 367 may be hung
lsof: WARNING: can't start() hfs file system /Volumes/Originals
Output information may be incomplete
assuming "dev=e000014" from mount table

After receiving that information, the machine completely locked up. That seems rather ominous. Originals is totally backed up so wiping it isn't a real issue except for the time required to restore it as it's almost 3TB worth of data.

Has anyone encountered this before? What exactly does that error mean? Will a reformat fix it? Should I be worried about the other volumes?

The last few hours have been taken up by deleting the RAID concatenation on /Volumes/Originals, reformatting and trying to copy my data back. Unfortunately, it appears that I cannot copy back to /Volumes/Originals. The copy goes for about 2gb and then hangs. This happens whether I use ditto in Terminal or drag-n-drop in Finder. The only way to release it is to restart the machine with a hard reboot.

The drives in question are 3 1TB Hitachi drives mounted in a SwiftData and attached to a Sonnet Temp SATA card. Not sure if that's helpful information or not.

Thanks in advance

Sean


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## Satcomer (Feb 20, 2008)

Check out this hint about Spotlight and drives.


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