Friday, August 29, 2014

Windows Search Not Working

I was having a problem getting Windows Search to work on a Windows 2012 R2 server and didn't find much help out in Google-land.  Most results for Windows Search or Indexing Service was for desktop OS's also.  

Here was my scenario:
  • I installed the Windows Search Feature on a Windows 2012 R2 server.  
  • In Control Panel -> Indexing Options, I added the "Marketing" folder from a drive that is attached to the server, plus a few other folders on a different drive.  
  • The "few others" seemed to work.  However, now on the Marketing folder, when you did a search,  all that would come up was "No items match your search."
  • What's worse, you could no longer search the Marketing folder at all, not even the slow non-indexed way.  Everything would turn up "No items match your search."
  • Searching for help on the Internet was a bust. 
I noticed Event ID 3036 in the Application log.  There were some hits on that, but again not much help on Google.  The main thing that caught my attention in the log entry though was "Crawl could not be completed on content source <file:H:/Marketing/>."    Then down lower in the details it said "Access is denied". Ding-Ding!  

I checked the security on H: (a local hard drive) but that looked fine.  However, when I looked at the Marketing folder itself, the security was changed and inheritance was taken away.  This was so that Domain Users didn't have any sort of access by default - only certain users have access to that folder.  The issue was that whoever setup the security (which might have been me) didn't put SYSTEM in there with Full Control (or any rights at all in this case.)  I added SYSTEM in there with Full Control and applied; it took a while to propagate.  

Within a few minutes of that change I noticed (within the Indexing Options control panel applet) that indexing was chugging again and the documents count was going up.  When done, indexing was working – yeah!! 

So since there wasn’t any solution that I could find when searching the Internet, I figured I’d toss it on where to perhaps help the next guy!


This was helpful too, so I didn’t have to wait FOREVER for indexing to take place.

Make indexing run faster (don't pause for user activity)
Regedit -> Computer\HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Search\UseLowPriorityConfiguration - change to "0"


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Science Fiction Author / Vice President of Technology for The Christman Company