Turning off Spotlight While Apple has given Mac users a great tool with Spotlight, those of us in the repair and IT departments have certainly got our work cut out for us when we want to disable it. Try as you might you won't find a check mark or preference panel anywhere in Mac OS X to turn it off. Why would you wish to turn this off on one of your Macs? I have an easy answer there, let us suppose you have a drive with bad sectors or damaged filesystem structures that you wish to repair or recover from. If the drive works enough to show an icon on the desktop, you can bet spotlight will begin to index it, and aggravate any crashing issues that go with this drive into high gear. I highly recommend that you turn off Spotlight when you configure a Mac to be your recovery workstation, and here is how that is done. Open the Terminal application in your utilities folder and have the pico application open up the hostconfig file, which is what Mac OS X uses to configure itself: sudo pico /etc/hostconfig You will be prompted for your admin password and then you will be able to view the hostconfig file, which is simply a list of settings in text format. Scroll through this list until you see this: SPOTLIGHT=-YES- And now change it to: SPOTLIGHT=-NO- To save and quit pico, press Control-X, and answer yes to saving your changes. Now reboot and enjoy Tiger without Spotlight! Be careful to do this only your recovery workstation because this will cause a lot of trouble for a standard user who tries to locate files or emails using the normal Find commands. All Articles |
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