I've been fighting with this error for almost a day now. Very frustrating

"Unable to retrieve topology component health states. This may be because the admin component is not up and running."

I've tried most of the MSDN Searches Fixes but still no luck....

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/sharepoint/en-US/newthread?category=sharepoint&forum=

http://pointsforsharing.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=5#searchapp

and even this

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/sharepoint/en-US/50acc2b8-dd56-4d5a-a660-dffa325ef807/sharepoint-2013-search-not-provisioning-correctly

Tried all of those and no luck, in addition I even try adding the search service app via the config wizard.

No luck at all.

Kindly please advice on any other methods ? Thanks in advance.

Did you tweak anything in memory for node runner process? I did same thing and battled it for 3 days. 

I did put it to 50 and then put it back to the default "0" and still no luck, any suggestions ?

Wow, so after almost trying all the google and MSDN searches I made non of them work...

How I fixed it ? Repair SharePoint under Control Panel... I can't believe why I didn't do this first

Running repair is a new one for me. I have always avoiding this error by doing the following.

1. Start with a fresh Windows install
2. Run windows update until there are no more updates - this should only be after 3 or 4 reboots and update downloads
3. Install the 4 infamous missing prerequisites http://www.dontpapanic.com/blog/?p=256
4. Install SharePoint

I got the same error :

"Unable to retrieve topology component health states. This may be because the admin component is not up and running."

restarting search servers solved my problem.

here is one more scenario that I faced for the same error message...thought might be useful to someone
http://aseempandit.wordpress.com/2013/12/24/unable-to-retrieve-the-search-application-topology/

I just rebooted the server, removed the Search Service Application and installed it again, and now it works - without errors!

I have used (twice) the following script to provision the Search Service:

http://www.toddklindt.com/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=378

Best regards,