Hi all,

We have an Exchange 2013 server of which the search index is corrupted.
The message when checking the search index in Powershell is as following:

Get-MailboxDatabaseCopyStatus -Server SERVERNAME | FL Name, *Index*

Name : Mailbox Database 1
ContentIndexState : FailedAndSuspendedContent
IndexErrorMessage : The content index is corrupted.
ContentIndexErrorCode : 19

When checking the Event viewer, we see the following message logged:

Log Name:      Application
Source:        MSExchangeFastSearch
Date:          23-4-2015 8:57:07
Event ID:      1009
Task Category: General
Level:         Warning
Keywords:      Classic
User:          N/A
Computer:      MAILSERVER

Description:The indexing of mailbox database Mailbox Database 1 encountered an unexpected exception. 

Error details: Microsoft.Exchange.Search.Core.Abstraction.OperationFailedException: The component operation has failed.
--->Microsoft.Exchange.Search.Engine.FeedingSkippedForCorruptionException: "Feeding was skipped for '412595f4-98d0-4bf6-8ac2-89457c37b872 (Mailbox Database 1)' due to the state 'Failed', error code: 'CatalogCorruption', failure code: '4036033', failure reason: '5 consecutive merges failed. Requesting seeding as it is >= 5.'."   
at Microsoft.Exchange.Search.Engine.SearchFeedingController.InternalExecutionStart()   at Microsoft.Exchange.Search.Core.Common.Executable.InternalExecutionStart(Object state)   --- End of inner exception stack trace ---   at Microsoft.Exchange.Search.Core.Common.Executable.EndExecute(IAsyncResult asyncResult)   
at Microsoft.Exchange.Search.Engine.SearchRootController.ExecuteComplete(IAsyncResult asyncResult)

In this message, the problem seems to be in the following line:

"Feeding was skipped for '412595f4-98d0-4bf6-8ac2-89457c37b872 (Mailbox Database 1)' 
due to the state 'Failed', error code: 'CatalogCorruption', 
failure code: '4036033', failure reason: '5 consecutive merges failed. Requesting seeding as it is >= 5

I just can't find the solution for it. What i've tried:

- Upgrade Exchange 2013 to CU8.
- Stopped the search services, deleted the search index folder and started the services. This triggers the re-creation of the search index, but after some hours indexing, it fails again with the same reason.
- Executed a RepairMailboxRequest to check all mailboxes on the mailserver for problems, this came up with no problems.

Anyone know how I can solve this issue?

If server is in DAG and you have a mailbox database copy, you can re-seed the catalog.
If this does not work, maybe if mailbox database is not too large, I would recommend creating a new one, move mailboxes to a new one. If some items are corrupted, they can be skipped during mailbox migration.

The server is not in a DAG, it is standalone. The database is not big, but the machine disk capacity does not allow me currently to create a new database and move the mailboxes so I am looking for a solution with the current setup.

So a few comments;

1. How large is the database

2. How much free space is available on the disk/lun where the DB is located?

3. have you checked the application event log to see if there are any critical errors associated with the disk system or anything else for that matter? If your having disk issues those would need to be resolved first

4. Are you patched up to the latest releases on your 2013 server?

My gut tells me that you probably have a DB issue and if so you would need to either move the mailboxes to a new DB or run an eseutil /d but that's offline and requires 115% of the db size to accomplish so IMHO you should to the mailbox move since at least that's online.  Only other possibility is its a bug that could be resolved by upgrading.  I doubt that's the case but its a possibility

It seemed that there was a corrupt healthmailbox on the datastore which caused the search problems. After removing it and purging the disconnected mailboxes, the search index worked fine again!