Reader Christopher Crow’s conundrum concerned me. It seems that Dr. Crow (for he’s a PhD) noticed that the hard drive on his Dual 500MHz Power Mac G4 running Mac OS X 10.2.8 wasn’t indexed. He dutifully pressed Index Now in the drive’s Get Info window and waited…
and waited…
and waited…
And finally decided that he’d waited long enough and pressed the Stop Indexing button, at which point, nothing ensued — the progress bar made no progress yet wouldn’t go away. At this point he called for my help.
I suggested that he launch Process Viewer, look for the ContentIndexing entry, highlight it, select Quit Process from the Processes menu, and in the resulting dialog box, choose Quit. If it won’t quit, select ContentIndexing again, choose Quit Process again, and click Force Quit in the resulting dialog box.
The procedure is similar in Panther’s Activity Monitor except that Activity Monitor provides you with a convenient Quit button in its toolbar.