Search service stuck at stopping or starting

>> Search service stuck at stopping or starting

Search as we know is one of the best features on MOSS, Office SharePoint has the best ability to index and search documents, file share’s, and other things as well, it stores the indexed documents in search databases and renders them whenever required. Well that’s about how it works, but what will you do if your search service is central admin is shows the status as stopping or starting,

If your search service is stuck even after you reboot the server this might be a problem,
Look at the services console first and check if Windows SharePoint Search service is running and if the Office SharePoint servers search is running as well
Then check if they are running with the right service accounts.
This problem may arise the most when you have the two different accounts configured to run WSS and MOSS

What should I do?

Now you are at a stage where your search service is stuck it’s neither started not stopped. So when nothing works in SharePoint the command line works, let’s get our hero to work. J

First of all let’s get the search service stopped first. We will stop the OSearch first and then the WSS search.
To stop the search server you will have to use the command line operation here is the command

Stsadm –o osearch –action stop
Run iisreset / noforce
Similarly you will have to stop the wss search service

Stsadm –o spsearch –action stop

This will force stop the services, then we will un-provision the services before we actually start them, now if you are wondering what is provision service command used for it actually Starts or stops the SPService on the local computer or a custom service. To enumerate all the current running services with their service types in the farm, use the enumservices operation

You can know more from the link here http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288605.aspx

Before running the provision service you will have to run stsadm –o enum services command to get the service type and name.

So copy every thing between and
Then run the command

stsadm -o provisionservice -action stop -servicetype Osearch

similarly for sp search.

Then run the following command psconfig -cmd services -install, and install the services.

Then run psconfig -cmd secureresources

Then start spsearch and osearch from command line

Stsadm –o spsearch –action start & stsadm –o osearch - action start


I bet the services will be started now