Can a SharePoint 2013 search index reset change the index location?

Question

The SP index was reset recently, after that, over the weekend, the D: drive that was hosting the index got completely full and, after that, the index reverted to its original location on the C: drive, which caused a whole lot of issues, because the system drive got completely full, which caused additional issues.

What could have caused the index to be now stored in the C: drive indead of on its previous location in D: drive?

Answer 1

Due to the reason drive was full its possible it moved on to the default location on C:\ in temp folder . I have seen this behavior with ULS Logs.

Resetting index does not change the index location.

Make sure you have drive big enough to host the index files, reset the index and start the crawl . you should see the index populated on D;.

Use the PowerShell to make sure index location is same as D:\ in Search service application.

Answer 2

Hi @Maria Ramirez ,

Is there anything has been changed before the issue occurs? Did any other users move index location?

When you reset the search index in SharePoint Server, all content is immediately removed from the search index and users will not be able to retrieve search results. SharePoint 2013 search index reset are not able to change the index location.

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