Tiger Bits: Possible Spotlight Bug

This afternoon, I decided to plug an external Firewire drive into my Powerbook and do a clean install of Tiger onto that drive, just to test the differences between running Tiger off the clean install on my Powerbook (via the Firewire drive) versus off of the internal Archive and Install installation on the Powerbook's default hard drive.

So, I installed to the external drive, called PortaHD, and didn't transfer anything over from the Powerbook's internal drive, Macintosh HD. When it booted up off of PortaHD everything was looking good and clean and I saw the little video intro that I missed out on the other two times I've installed Tiger. Spotlight started scanning everything, including Macintosh HD, but I didn't want it to, so I opened up the System Preferences of the PortaHD installation and moved Macintosh HD over into the Privacy pane. Oddly, there were the same folders that I already had in the Privacy Pane of my Macintosh HD installation in the Porta HD installation.

I didn't think anything of it until later when I rebooted to Macintosh HD. I keyed over to Spotlight and typed Firefox, wanting to launch Firefox. It didn't come up. That's when it clicked in my head.

I looked back in the Spotlight preference pane, and sure enough, my Macintosh HD was still set in the privacy pane. So now everything is reindexing and I lost the last several days of indexing and training Spotlight, all because the preferences on a separate installation on a separate drive leaked over to this one. Very very odd.

UPDATE: It would appear that this is actually a Spotlight feature, which is explained nicely by the first two comments to this post. Still, I wish I had known it was a feature before I mistakenly privatized my main drive in Spotlight.