Friday, September 18, 2015

Windows 7 search not showing results from mapped Server 2008 R2 share



I have a Windows Server 2008 R2 network share setup as a map drive in Win 7 x64. I want to search it via Windows 7 but I always get "no items match your search". It's as though it's not even attempting to search.



The File Server role with Windows Search Service is installed. The drive holding the network share is added to the indexing options on the server, and it indicates that indexing is complete.



From what I understand, the search query should be sent to the server (where the content is indexed), executed, and the results returned.




Failed solutions:



Source:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7itpronetworking/thread/afb904c1-1c61-4aae-b6b1-5cf525b9f8de/




  • create a symbolic link to the UNC. I find that to be an extreme fix to what should be a simple problem.


  • enable "Always Available Offline" for the UNC. In a corporate setting it's not acceptable to duplicate all server content locally, nor is it feasible with many TB's of server storage.


  • install the "Windows Desktop Search: Add-in for Files on Microsoft Networks"

    http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?DisplayLang=en&FamilyID=f7e981d9-5a3b-4872-a07e-220761e27283 It allows a UNC path to be entered into the indexing options on the client and then the index built locally. However, the add-on is not for Windows 7 and is not supported for x64.




Update:




  • The setup includes two clients (Both fully updated Win7 x64), one file server, no domain. Just to make it easy (security isn't an issue in this case), anonymous access is used. I really doubt it's a permissions problem as I can access, modify, and create content on the mapped drive. I just can't search it.


  • Searching on the server ALWAYS works. The share in question has lot of content: 2.17TB with 274,633 Files, however, the folder(s) I wish to search has only 11,503 files (54.3GB)


  • Searching on one of the two clients works most of the time. It appears to be somewhat unreliable. Some days it works, others it does not. Searching on the second client has never worked.


  • The index has been rebuilt on the server as well as both clients.





Update 2:




  • From the client, if I highlight all files in the share, go to properties, and let Win 7 count the files, then proceed to do a search after the counting is complete, it works. I'm not sure why that worked (something to do with rebuilding the index, properly this time?). I have a feeling that as the fileserver content changes it wont stay working. Any thoughts?


Answer



Given that you're trying to search a server and not your local system, it's probably not related to indexing as you shouldn't have all your clients indexing a file server.




What happens on the system that doesn't work if you login as a completely different user and try to search the sever? If you get results, try the steps laid out on this site



There's a registry key:



HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced



In this key there are two values (both hex dword)



Start_SearchFiles
Start_SearchPrograms




Uninstalling Windows Search sets the value of both of these to zero, when they default to something else. However, reinstalling Windows Search does not restore them to their default setting like it probably should. By manually setting both of them to 1, it re-enabled the windows search function from the start menu. Somebody might want to notify one of the Microsoft software engineers that they should correct this issue so that reinstalling Windows Search properly configures this registry key back to its default setting, that way if anybody else does what I just did they'll avoid the same headache I went through. (I don't know how to contact them myself.)



Another thing to try would be to try the steps outlined on this site


No comments:

Post a Comment

linux - How to SSH to ec2 instance in VPC private subnet via NAT server

I have created a VPC in aws with a public subnet and a private subnet. The private subnet does not have direct access to external network. S...