Deleting the search service application

The search crawl db got corrupt in my development environment.  After trying to remove the crawl db and component through the UI and being unsuccessful, I decided to just go ahead and blow away the search service app and recreate. 

So I go to the Service Apps page, select the search service, and click delete.  Twenty minutes later, the service is still being deleted.  Not.  Scrap that and head for PowerShell.

Twenty minutes later, still waiting.

Over to the old man stsadm.exe

 

The SharePoint PowerShell cmdlets are great and all, but sometimes they just don’t work.

Note: To get the id of the service application, you can do one of the following:

From the UI

Navigate to the service applications page.  Mouse-over the search application link, and observe the id in the status bar.

From Powershell

Get-SPServiceApplication |?{$_.name -eq "Search Service Application"}