Search Crawl status throwing error

Question

Hi,
We installed MOSS on our clients machine and Search has been problematic from the getgo.
When we have performed a forced restart on the osearch service (http://bruteforcesharepoint.blogspot.com/2009_04_01_archive.html), within the next couple of hours the crawler status wil be Error. But, search at this point is still working. Indexing basically
stops and event errors are thrown in the event logs, but searching is still possible.
Here are the symptoms:
the Crawl status is 'Error'
/ssp/admin/_layouts/searchsspsettings.aspx (Search Settings page) is throwing a HTTP 403 error : The website declined to show this webpage.
I can still get to the Search Administration, and when I go to view the Content Sources or view the crawl logs specifically, I get the same 403 error.
When I try to 'Reset all crawled content', that is when Search dies. I get the message an exception error message.
When I try to stop the Office SharePoint Search service in Central Admin, it hangs in the Stopping state. It'll only come out of this if I go through the task manger and manually force the process to stop and then start it again using the
stsadm -o osearch -action start -role index
command then search starts again. And I have to reset the crawled content and perform a full crawl (apart from also reconfiguring the indexer). I can successfully perform a full crawl, takes about 2 hours and it does an incremental crawl for the first
couple of increments. Then all of a sudden I get the follow errors in the event view log:
Error event ID: 1030
Source: Userenv
Desc: Windows cannot query for the list of Group Policy objects. Check the event log for possible messages previously logged by the policy engine that describes the reason for this.
And then we get thousands on the following error (the indexing schedule timer job basically stops working):
Error event id 6398
Source: Windows SharePoint Services 3
Desc: The Execute method of job definition Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.IndexingScheduleJobDefinition (ID b6d1868e-26a5-4ae2-b922-0f129fd77a61) threw an exception. More information is included below.
Access is denied. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070005 (E_ACCESSDENIED))
Now before you ask me about permission, we have created an admin user called spadmin who has access to everything and is the default content access account as well. It is also spadmin that is running the osearch, not the network account.
Can anyone provide any insights into why we are experiencing this issue??? We have gone round in circles trying to figure out what we're doing wrong or whether this is a sharepoint issue.
any help would be much appreciated.
Cheers
danielle

Answer 1

hi danielle,
I was also in a same sort of situation,  here is what i did:
1> locate the catalog file directory.
2>place CI dumps in the 12 hive/bin folder.
3>run the command
cidump -dump "catalog filedirectory location" -widset>c:\xyz.txt
4>search with the word "exception" if there is a hit eg
error:excetion caught xxxxxxxxx in shadow index xxxxxxxx then u need to delete this index.
5>run below command
cidump -removeindex "catalog filedirectory location" -i xxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxx signifies the shadow index .
6> restart the searchservice manually,timersevice.
if the issue persists let us know
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