So last night I setup our archive logs scripts for my PC and Nicky’s laptop because since my Vista rebuild I’ve never reconfigured it.
This morning, Nicky’s laptop ran it’s first log export and I was reviewing the logs to see how things where looking based on the BSOD’s she been getting recently, and I was shocked by the number of red crosses in the log all from the Windows Search Service regarding failed search indexing.
I popped open Control Panel and headed for the Index Options to see that indexing was currently in maintenance mode which didn’t sound good. After a quick Live Search I was still left slightly slightly at a loss due to the lack of results in the search. Even TechNet at Microsoft didn’t really have much in the way of help for this problem.
After a further dig, I discovered that the Indexer stores the catalog in a file – Time to hit the delete key. On her laptop I stopped the Windows Search service and headed for C:ProgramDataMicrosoftSearchDataApplicationsWindows and deleted the Windows.edb file which is a Windows database format file.
After deleting the file I was confused that the file reappeared but instead of being 65,000KB it was 1000KB. When I went back to the services console, the Search service had automatically restarted – How clever.
At the moment the indexes are being rebuilt which will probably take a few hours or so, but so far no errors in the event log and all working ok. Problem solved.