Runaway Sharepoint 2003 Indexing!

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 09:54:00 +0000

We have a couple of sharepoint install's here and I recently had an issue with the server running out of disk space- the server has not been up long and had around 60GB free, so this seemed a little strange. On investigation it seems the site had been indexing 100's of external websites for the purposes of searching, and it was these indexes which had consumed the space. Under content administration there is an option to reset the search indexes, but this option just hung when clicked. After much googling and messing around i eventually found the solution- I had to physically remote onto the desktop of the server, open the task manager and close the mssearch process- then from the front page of sharepoint ;

Click Site Settings >[under Search Setting and Indexed Content] click Configure Search and Indexing > [under Content Indexes] click Manage content indexes > highlight the erronious index so the menu prompt pops up, then from the menu select "Reset Content Index".

The trick is to make sure mssearch.exe isnt running as this seems to lock the files- be aware the server will try to restart the process when you close it!

Once you've cleared the index, you can then adjust the indexing settings to prevent it from happening in future.

Shawson's Code Blog » Sharepoint

Runaway Sharepoint 2003 Indexing!