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FAQ: How to completely reset WDS / Windows Search

April 20, 2007 at 9:29 pm
Desktop Search, WDS FAQ

Sometimes index corruption or other problems with Windows Search cannot be fixed by the “Rebuild Index” option in the control panel.  One troubleshooting option you can try is to tell the indexer to reset the indexer to its out-of-the-box default setup.

For WDS 3.0 on Windows XP or Windows Vista:

  1. Open Regedit.exe
  2. Expand the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE node
  3. Navigate to SOFTWARE \ MICROSOFT \ WINDOWS SEARCH
  4. On the right-hand side of the screen, you should see a REG_SZ value named “SetupCompletedSuccessfully” which normally is set to a value of “1″.
  5. Double-click on the value and change it to 0.
  6. Restart the Windows Search service (either using the Services control panel, or the command line “net stop wsearch” followed by “net start wsearch”)

This will result in a rebuild of your index and will also reset your crawl scopes (folders to be indexed).  It may also reset certain Indexing-related settings.





2 Responses to “FAQ: How to completely reset WDS / Windows Search”

  1. Phil Czapla [cha-pla] Says:
    July 8th, 2007 at 7:30 pm

    Brandon, regarding adding metadata to files and folders that can be found via WDS per this article:
    http://ceitl.zanestate.edu/blog/archives/2006/02/tagging-files-in-windows-xp-and-why-youll-ditch-google-desktop/

    Does anyone have a program to add a right context menu item to a file or folder to make the metadata entry easier???

    Thanks,

    Phil

  2. Allen Says:
    July 22nd, 2007 at 7:16 pm

    I have this problem happen on 2 systems now, where if I try to rename a file, it just sends explorer into a locked loop - by killing explorer, and starting it again, the rename takes place.

    Now, I tracked this back to Indexing service, and made the changes as advised here, to reset the indexing service. It fixed it one one pc, but not the other. -

    When I do this on the second PC, the windows search service now refuses to start. any ideas?

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Hi. I'm Brandon. I'm a geek, and I work on Search technology for Windows at Microsoft. This is my blog.

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