I'm having some serious issues in trying to resolve a search indexing issue on a dedicated Windows server 2016 file server.
The server is a Hyper-V VM in our DC and it's sole purpose is to act as a file server to replace the customers old on premises 2008R2 server which will soon be completely phased out.
The problem we are facing is the search index does not appear to index all files properly. On the old server with the same (general data) directory selected for indexing, around 300.000 files are indexed. On the new server only about 100.000 files are indexed.
This also reflects itself in the search results. Even when just looking for an extension such as *.pdf, a vast difference in results is present when comparing the search results of both servers. When searching specifically in a directory for which the old
server is showing results and the new one isn't, I can see it containing 4 pdf files and the search just comes up blanc.
I've already rebuildt the search index several times, used both sfc and dism repair options (no results). I've also resolved Search service error 3104 by assigning DCOM permissions to system and remove "ready for archiving" properties to see if this
changes anything and still nothing seems to work.
This problem has persisted right from the start for a server which was installed from scratch and has no 3rd party software on it other then Adobe reader, which was installed to try and resolve PDF indexing issues.
I really hope someone has any idea how to resolve this, before I have to reinstall the server.