Mac OS X 10.4.1 (#7): Spotlight: Choking on Finder.DAT files?; Problems with sleep: More potential solutions

CNET staff

Sept. 2, 2009 11:31 a.m. PT

3 min read

Spotlight: Choking on Finder.DAT files? We've received scattered reports from readers indicating that Mac OS X 10.4.x's Spotlight may have problems indexing and searching for Finder.DAT files -- data files usually containing text created by an older Classic Mac OS application like ClarisWorks or spawned by another third-party application.

MacFixIt reader Dave Stephens offers a case example:

"I thought the FireWire hard drive was somehow Spotlight-incompatible. Not so. But I suppose Spotlight doesn't like Finder.DAT files at all. It hung on indexing, first giving a bogus hourly that got bigger and bigger but never went away. So I made the volume 'Private'. When I made it 'not private' again, it simply hung.

"So then I deleted the only files I knew were superfluous, the Finder.DAT files that were everywhere (from a ton of CF Card derived folders).

"I don't know where they came from, but I think I had a third party utility that created them, or perhaps they are a remnant from the Nikon camera that made the containing folders. In any event, when I deleted all of them, suddenly Spotlight was able to index the volume it couldn't before."

If you're experiencing a similar issue, please let us know.

Problems with sleep: More potential solutions We continue to report on sleep after upgrading to Mac OS X 10.4.1. These include an inability to properly go to sleep, problems waking from sleep, and the display going to sleep without the Mac going to sleep.

Yesterday we noted that external peripherals, especially Bluetooth devices, can be to blame and noted a few related solutions.

Now readers are reporting a few additional workarounds.

Brian Sheppard says that, in his case, running Mac OS X's cron tasks -- an automatic process if you leave your Mac on 24 hours a day which can also be accomplished with a variety of shareware and freeware tools like MacJanitor, noted below -- resolved virtually all sleep problems.

Brian writes:

"I'm not sure why, but after using MacJanitor to run the cron tasks, my computer now sleeps just fine. I had tried all the other suggestions (I don't have Bluetooth on this computer so I knew that wasn't an issue) and none of them had worked. However, I ran MacJanitor and left the room for awhile to let it do it's thing. When I came back, my computer was asleep and has worked fine ever since."

Meanwhile, MacFixIt reader Paul Colvin reports that a previously published workaround, which involves deleting specific .plist files, only remains effective (in his case) if Energy Saver settings are not modified afterward.

Paul writes:

"In your report of the Tiger sleep problem (#6) it was suggested that the fallback might be to delete the various .plist files associated with sleep. I would like to report that this appears to be the proper answer, as long as the user does not customize the power settings. After going through this routine twice it became apparent that the power management system is unable to function properly with non-default settings."

Previous Mac OS X 10.4.1 coverage:

Resources

let us know

noted

MacJanitor

deleting specific .plist

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