Forced propagation of search catalogs is unsuccessful and low disk space events are logged in SharePoint Portal Server 2003 (823549)

SYMPTOMS

When you add additional search servers to your Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 server farm and force the propagation of all search catalogs, you may experience one or more of the following symptoms:

The propagation of the search catalogs is successful on the new search servers.
The propagation of the search catalogs is unsuccessful (fails) on the original search server.
One or more events appear in the system log of Event Viewer on the original server indicating that hard disk space is low.

When you view the available hard disk space on the original server, you notice that sufficient hard disk space is available to contain the propagated search catalogs. For example, you notice that available disk space is double that of the catalog data.

CAUSE

This behavior occurs if both the following conditions exist:

You force the propagation of all the search catalogs at the same time.

-and-
The original search server does not have available disk space that is more than double the amount of catalog data.

When the catalog data is copied during the forced propagation, two copies of the catalog data exist (the original copy and the newly-crawled copy). However, each copy has a propagated Jet database file in addition to the catalog index file. Because of this propagated Jet database file, additional hard disk space is required to successfully complete the search catalog propagation. If this hard disk space is not available, the propagated index cannot be loaded. In this case, the catalog is removed, freeing additional hard disk space.

WORKAROUND

To work around this behavior, force the propagation of one search catalog at a time, or make sure that the available hard disk space is more than double the amount of all the catalog index sizes.

MORE INFORMATION

For more information about how to deploy, configure, and manage SharePoint Portal Server, see the Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Administration Guide. The Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Administration Guide (Administrator's Help.chm) is located in the Docs folder in the root folder of the SharePoint Portal Server 2003 CD.

For more information about Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server, visit the following Microsoft Web site:

http://www.microsoft.com/office/sharepoint/prodinfo/default.mspx