How to move Microsoft Search files and folders to a new partition on an Exchange Server 2003 cluster node

This article discusses how to move Microsoft Search files and folders of the full text indexes to a new partition on a Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 cluster node. You may have to move these files and folders because of insufficient disk space.

Note It can be intimidating to use the Pstoreutl utility and the Catutil utility because you have to delete the resources.

If unpartitioned space is available on a shared drive, you can use a mount point to move the files and folders to a different partition. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Take the Microsoft Search resource offline.
2. Stop the Microsoft Search service on both cluster nodes. To do this, click Start, click Run, type net stop mssearch, and then click OK.
3. Rename the ExchangeServer_Virtual_Server_Name folder. By default, this folder is in the following location:
   C:\Program Files\ExchSrvr\
4. In the same parent folder as the original ExchangeServer_Virtual_Server_Name folder, create a partition as a mount point that has the name "ExchangeServer_Virtual_Server_Name."
   
   For more information about how to do this, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
   280297  (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/280297/ ) How to configure volume mount points on a Microsoft Cluster Server
5. Make sure that the permissions on the new ExchangeServer_Virtual_Server_Name mount point match the permissions of the original folder.
6. Copy the contents of the original folder to the new ExchangeServer_Virtual_Server_Name folder.
7. Restart the Microsoft Search service. To do this, click Start, click Run, type net start mssearch, and then click OK.
8. Bring the cluster resource online.

For more information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: