Azure Hybrid & Cloud Migration Blog

Author: Zahir Hussain Shah | MVP Exchange Server

Recently, I happened to see a problem for a Exchange Server 2010 machine, where creating or re-naming any folder on any of the disk of the machine, takes abnormal time to complete the task, upon troubleshooting we found the following.

Problem:

Creating new folder or re-naming existing folders for Exchange Server, Windows Server 2008 machine takes abnormal long time, and explorer.exe stops responding for some time. System disk suffers from great slowness for normal Windows operations.

Cause:
By default all partitions in Windows Server are set for the indexing for providing fast response for the files and folder searching. Microsoft Search service uses this pre-indexed data on each drive to provide fast search results.

While you upgrade the OS from Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2008, or due to some reason, this indexed data on the disk / disk indexing or Windows Search service starts mal-functioning, and this leads to a stage, where whenever you try to perform any disk related operation on the machine, it takes abnormal time to complete the task.

Solution:
You can combine or choose any of the following option as a solution or workaround for this problem.

1. Disabling Windows Search Service, and seeing the its effect whether it fixes the problem.

2. Un-checking the “Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed in addition to properties check-box on the disk, you are expecting performance issues. E.g. C:\ drive.

3. Or as a best way to fix this problem, you can re-build the index of the problem drive, from the Control Panel\Indexing Options\Advance\Rebuild (Troubleshooting (Delete and rebuild index)).

Cheers!