I want to share with you interesting case I had this week at one of my customers, the CTO complained that many users weren’t able to search content on Outlook 2013 in Terminal.
I thought about several potential things such as Outlook versions, caches, Microsoft Updates, and just at the end of possibilities, I went to the server to check some event logs. I opened the event viewer and found the following warning event:
Database number 1:
Database number 2:
I opened Exchange Shell and ran this:
Get-MailboxDatabaseCopyStatus * | ft -auto
Found that both databases were failed status in contentindexstate row
The solution was pretty easy:
- Stoping MSExchangeFastSearch and HostControllerService Services
- finding the GUID of the database delete X.Single folder or rename it.
- If you have several servers, please repeat these steps to each server.
Once you finish, please start the MS ExchangeFastSearch and HostControllerService Services, then run
Get-MailboxDatabaseCopyStatus * | ft -auto
You will find that you DB in Crawling status which means that they are in rebuild progress:
You suppose to see under ContentIndexState “Healthy” status. It takes times until it is finished. [Several hours]
It was pretty important for me to share this case with you, BTW it covers also about Exchange 2013 & Exchange 2016, in Exchange 2010 you can run ResetSearchIndex.ps1 -force -all using PowerShell and it knows to fix this as well.