SharePoint 2010 search not working – How to Fix it?

Published by Jacob Martin on June 30, 2014

SharePoint 2010 is excellent than ever before. Organization search for SharePoint 2010 have all features and function of MOSS 2007 Search, like richer navigation, people search, but it goes beyond with enhancement and related search capabilities. After Microsoft get hold of FAST and implement this to SharePoint, it then offers a separate add-on to SharePoint for those keen to put in high end organization search.

While search engine is very important in SharePoint adoption, there are many scenarios where users reported they could not find the predictable results from the search engine. So, in this blog you will learn about one scenario related to search result and its solution so that you can resolve such issues of SharePoint quickly.

Issue

Working in an environment where administrator maintains dedicated SharePoint environments ranging in size from one server to thousands of servers may result in several issues. One of the latest issues is that your search engine on a SharePoint does not work. In such case you will notice that whatever you search for the result you get will be “We did not find any result for the keyword you searched”. In some worst cases you could also expect that search is not able to access the DBs. In this case search will not work and you may get the following recognized message:

The search service is currently offline. Visit the Services on Server page in SharePoint Central Administration to verify whether the service is enabled. This might also be because an indexer move is in progress.

At such point of time you may look and try some of the normal methods to fix the issue. Like stopping and starting SharePoint admin service, stopping and starting the office search service, checking the index account for making sure that it had been locked out or you may even tried to recreate the SSP but still you are not able to fix the problem.

When such problem occurs then you might get the below familiar error message too that defines that your SharePoint search has stopped working:

• Event Type:             Error
• Event Source:          Office Server Search
• Event Category:       Gatherer “cannot be crawled.
• Event ID:  2436
• Description: Application ‘Search index file on the search server’, Catalog ‘Search’ or Error backing up registry hive to the configuration database.
• Details: Access is denied. Verify that either the Default Content Access Account has access to this repository, or add a crawl rule to crawl this repository. If the repository being crawled is a SharePoint repository, verify that the account you are using has “Full Read” permissions on the SharePoint Web Application being crawled. (0x80041205)” or Registry backup failed because of a version mismatch.   (0x8004122b)

Solution

To fix the issue you may have tried the normal methods which I have mentioned above, but still if it does not solve the issue then you must configure the root cause for the problem. The root cause may be to the SharePoint SSP database, particularly registry Blob may have corrupted. So to fix the problem you can try the below methods:

1 – Delete From dbo.MSSConfiguration where Name = N’RegistryBlob’

You must recycle the time and office search services. Hence it will recreate the appropriate entry. After that you will be able to provision the search service in SharePoint as normal. Before applying this method please backup everything and do this at your own risk.

2 – Recommended solution – Even after following the above methods, if you still face the same problem then you can use third party program known as SharePoint File Repair Tool. Such tool is developed by the talented expert and comes with advance technologies which scans your SharePoint Database files and automatically repairs the issue and problem. With the helpo f this tool you can solve the search is not working problem, fix the index corruption of SharePoint Database, repair and recover database and many more. So, in future if you get such problem it is recommended that you must not forget to use SharePoint file repair tool.

How to Fix SharePoint 2010 search not working

1. Firstly launch the SharePoint Recovery Tool you would find an interface. This interface screen displays two options to recover SharePoint data: ‘Complete Repair’ and ‘Document Recovery’ Select as per your requirement.
2. If you choose ‘Complete Repair’, the screen will show the options for selecting and searching SQL Server (.MDF) files. Click on ‘Select File’ to select a SharePoint database for repair. If you do not know the actual path of the database which you want to repair, click on the ‘Search File’ to locate the MDF file in a specific drive. After selecting the desired file initiate the scanning process
3. After finishing the scan, the software would generate a tree of all SharePoint database tables and will display it in the left pane. You can select the table in the tree and can have the entire preview in the right pane. Then Click on ‘Repair’ to begin repairing for the selected database.
4. After clicking on ‘Repair’, this dialog box will appear. Specify the SQL Server name or Instance name and the desired destination path. Click on the ‘Browse’ option to choose the destination path. And select ‘OK’ button.
5. Once this process gets completed, you would find a dialog box that displays this message ‘Recovered file saved at the desired location. This shows that Recovery Process has successfully completed’. And select ‘OK’ button.
6. You would find another dialog box that asks whether you want to attach the repaired database to the web application. If you click on ‘Yes’ button, the above dialog box will be displayed. In the web application URL type, the name of the corrupt database and SQL Server Instance name. Then Select ‘OK’ button and proceed. When the process gets finished, you would be able to access the repaired database by opening the web application.

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