Spotlight issue

[Cecco]

I have a strange behaviour on 2 hard drives inside my MacPro5,1 running Catalina.

After booting the system, these drives are not searchable via Spotlight.

mdutil -s /Volumes/* gives me the following error for the 2 drives:

Error: unknown indexing state.

A simple unmount/mount of the drives fixes the issue. mdutil now returns: Indexing enabled. Spotlight search works immediately again without the need for rebuilding the index.

The issue reappears on the next boot of the system.

I've created a new account without any startup apps. Booting into this new account shows the same issue. So it is not related to any startup apps.

Checking the drives with Diskutility/First Aid gave me no errors.

My next try would be to copy all the data over to a freshly formated drive. Unfortunately both drives are 16TB drives and I have no spare disc of that size laying around.

If someone has an idea, what might be the reason for the issue, please post it here.

 

[jdw13]

I saw this "Error: unknown indexing state." on one of my Volumes when both "VolumeName" and "VolumeName 1" where present and the original "VolumeName" had only a ".Trashes" directory. In my case I suppose that the external drive was unmouted and mounted and only the second numbered Volume was active. My disk is USB bus with external bridge and I was connecting/disconnecting USB digitizer yesterday,when a quick unmount/mount may have happened and gone unnoticed.

From the Finder point of View, I believe I still saw "VolumeName" and not "VolumeName 1" but am not certain because I was focused upon looking from the shell and did not think to peak at the desktop and see what Finder was calling the Volume.

If this happens again, perhaps you find some way to see if the drives remained mounted and accessible the whole time. The bus (USB/Firewire/?) could have an issue that causes state to flap and not fully recover. It may be a long shot, but I would check to make sure all the disk connections are fully seated.

 

[Cecco]

Thank you for your reply.

I do not think, my issues are related to accidentally/partially unmounted volumes. I do not see any additional "VolumeName 1" volumes.

The 2 drives with issues are internal drives connected to the stock SATA connectors in my 2010 MacPro, which usually are never ejected until shutdown of the OS.

I plan to do do 2 tests to track down the issue:

1. Install a fresh system on an extranal SSD to check whether the issue is related to my current OS.
2. Copy all data on the prolematic drives to newly formated drives to check whether it is related to the drives hardware.

 

[hyphonic]

I have the same problem with my external USB drives on my Mac Pro 5.1. with Opencore
mdutil -s /Volumes/* gives for all 4 external drives, including a new one, just bought and newly formated
Error: unknown indexing state.
Indexing of the newly formated drive only worked until the next restart.
Checking the disk with a tool that gives more information like Macpilot shows indexing for the external USB-drives is disabled and can't be enabled (greyed out). This only happens with my external drives and only booted in Catalina. Under HighSierra and Mojave everything is ok. I Think its useless to copy 16 TB to another drive and format the drive only to find out that indexing is again disabled after the next restart

I couldn't find a solution up to now. Something is wrong with Catalina and my external drives