With the installation of Logic Pro 8, Apple’s ‘Spotlight’ feature is required: without it weird things happen such as files not being found when loading sounds! You end up having to manually go digging for files (which, when they’re 6 levels down is a pain in the arse).

So, I’d not actually realised Spotlight wasn’t working on my install of 10.5.2 – it’s not something I use that much but suddenly it became crucial. I dug around a bit and found that it was crashing like thus:

Apr 12 18:51:28 trixie ReportCrash[14588]: Formulating crash report for process Spotlight[147]
Apr 12 18:51:29 trixie com.apple.launchd[139] (com.apple.Spotlight[147]): Exited abnormally: Bus error
Apr 12 18:51:34 trixie ReportCrash[14588]: Saved crashreport to /Users/joel/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/Spotlight_2008-04-12-185121_trixie.crash using uid: 501 gid: 20, euid: 501 egid: 20

Bus error – sounds like a memory issue. Sadly not, it was a little more complex than that!

Next step was to find out how to reindex Spotlight. I found quite a few references on Apple’s support website here which referred to mdutil, but sadly this did odd things too giving me a ‘No index found for volume (-107)’.

Right, the gloves are off. Let’s drop the whole damn spotlight system by:

  • Running ‘Fix Permissions’ on the root disk – you never know, something odd might be prodding it.
  • Dropping the Spotlight preferences (they might be corrupt) by deleting /Users/joel/Library/Preferences/com.apple.spotlight.plist.
  • Killing anything cached by deleting /.Spotlight-V100. This actually gave an error but some stuff disappeared. That’ll do anyway.

At that point I thought ‘hang on – maybe something else is upsetting it?’. Just to be sure, I prevented Spotlight indexing anything to do with Parallels – and therein was the root cause. The damn thing was indexing the virtual disk for Parallels, which would send it into a tailspin. Sodding Windows again, eh?

A reboot later and it’s reindexing, and I’ll try the Logic Pro instruments again. We’ll see how it goes anyway 😀

Update: It’s worked. Bed now.