External drive causes spotlight and indexing errors

I'm having issues with an external drive. My computer is a new Macbook Air running Lion. I had an external drive hooked up today, including a TM backup, to get some files. I'm seeing the following output in /var/log/system.log (this wasn't causing system problems):

Sep  3 02:13:11 Jonathans-MacBook-Air mds[61]: (/Volumes/g_drive/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V2/CCEAAA21-72B7-4D1A-9B47-B86FFC0B3C81)(Error) IndexCI in     _CISyncContextSync:indexPrepareForSyncBulk error:2
Sep  3 02:13:11 Jonathans-MacBook-Air kernel[0]: 
Sep  3 02:13:13: --- last message repeated 59 times ---

Later on I was getting system problems such as

Broadcast Message from root@Jonathans-MacBook-Air.local                        
        (no tty) at 18:40 PDT...                                               

Sep  3 18:40:59 Jonathans-MacBook-Air kernel[0]:                               


Broadcast Message from root@Jonathans-MacBook-Air.local                        
    (no tty) at 18:41 PDT...                         

I saw this output earlier:

Sep  3 17:31:19 Jonathans-MacBook-Air fseventsd[20]: event logs in /Volumes/g_drive_mini/.fseventsd out of sync with volume.  destroying old logs. (24811 0 206316)
Sep  3 17:31:19 Jonathans-MacBook-Air fseventsd[20]: log dir: /Volumes/g_drive_mini/.fseventsd getting new uuid: 0573E4F8-3F32-4553-9DE8-B34ECA704B4A
Sep  3 17:31:23 Jonathans-MacBook-Air kernel[0]: 
Sep  3 17:31:23: --- last message repeated 5 times ---
Sep  3 17:31:23 Jonathans-MacBook-Air diskarbitrationd[15]: unable to mount /dev/disk2s1 (status code 0x00000001).
Sep  3 17:31:23 Jonathans-MacBook-Air kernel[0]: 
Sep  3 17:31:23: --- last message repeated 6 times ---
Sep  3 17:31:23 Jonathans-MacBook-Air mds[62]: (/Volumes/g_drive_mini/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V2/15C61CE8-48BE-4408-95BC-6B8EA4A3F8B1)(Error) IndexGeneral in commit_sync_datastore:commitSyncReverseStore err:14
Sep  3 17:31:23 Jonathans-MacBook-Air mds[62]: (/Volumes/g_drive_mini/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V2/15C61CE8-48BE-4408-95BC-6B8EA4A3F8B1)(Error) IndexCI in _CISyncContextCommitData:postSync error:14 6
Sep  3 17:31:23 Jonathans-MacBook-Air kernel[0]: 
Sep  3 17:31:33: --- last message repeated 10151 times ---
Sep  3 17:31:33 Jonathans-MacBook-Air mds[62]: (/Volumes/g_drive_mini/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V2/15C61CE8-48BE-4408-95BC-6B8EA4A3F8B1)(Warning) IndexGeneral in _SIOpenIndex:datastore clean, reverse store dirty
Sep  3 17:31:33 Jonathans-MacBook-Air kernel[0]: 
Sep  3 17:31:47: --- last message repeated 21829 times ---
Sep  3 17:31:47 Jonathans-MacBook-Air Image Capture Extension[491]: Failed to register for death of process with pid: 578

Is there an issue indexing spotlight on the external drive? Would the kernel emergency message have to have been created by this, or is it possible that an earlier event is responsible?

One thing that could maybe work is to completely remove the index folder and force TM to start the indexing from scratch (this will not remove any of the backup, just the Spotlight index). For this, you could type the following in the Terminal:

`sudo mv /Volumes/g_drive_mini/.Spotlight-V100 /Volumes/g_drive_mini/Spotlight-V100-old`

(you will need to type an admin password for that)

and then restart the computer. This will force a reindex of your data, since the above just removed all references to the spotlight index.

You can also then clean up the folder "Spotlight-V100-old" that will now appear on your hard drive.