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Matty Brown
Asked: 2013-05-17 03:16:15 +0800 CST

This network location can't be included because it is not indexed

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We are in the process of migrating a bunch of users' home directories onto a new server running Windows Storage Server 2008 R2.

For most users, this has gone well and our group policy has done its job in redirecting users' My Documents folders to their new network path (\\server\Users\%username%\Work).

The problem is, on a small number of Windows 7 PCs, the Documents library isn't automatically adding the users' redirected My Documents path as it does on other PCs. And when I try to manually correct this by adding the path myself, I get the message "This network location can't be included because it is not indexed."

Windows Search Service is installed onto the server and the Users directory has indexing enabled, so as far as I can tell, the network location IS indexed.

Even if I manually work around the issue and get the users' home directory included in the Documents library, Windows persists in telling me that "Some library features are unavailable due to unsupported library locations".

windows-server-2008-r2

5 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    In order for the Windows Search Service to be able to index a folder/share, the local SYSTEM account requires NTFS permissions on the server.

    After setting these permissions, group policy was able to add the users' home shares to the Documents library and I was able to do this manually myself without the message, "This network location can't be included because it is not indexed."

    Wouldn't it be nice if an error was logged in the System event log to let me know that Windows Search Service doesn't have the permissions it needs to index a folder?

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  2. One possible solution is to manually update registry keys which tell Windows where the "personal" folder is located.

    [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders] "Personal"="\\\\server\\users\\username\\Documents"

    [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders] "Personal"="\\\\server\\users\\username\\Documents"

    I believe these registry keys should be updated automatically when the group policy is applied.

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  3. I may have this sussed now...

    The local SYSTEM account did not have any permissions set on the folders in question. I've allowed SYSTEM to have full access, as per this thread. This could explain why Windows is telling me that the directory is not indexed.

    I've also changed the Offline files option on the share to allow "Only the files and programs that users specify are available offline" to be cached, instead of disabling offlines files for the share.

    The number of files indexed is going up... I'll report back on whether or not this turns out to be the solution. :)

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  4. I believe you have to allow offline files and have the redirected folders set to "always available offline" for windows search in windows 7 to index the network location. There is, I believe, a patch for windows 7 that allows it to index network UNC paths.

    I've seen other reports of people using mklink to a separate directory as a symbolic link to the network location and adding that directory to the library so windows search can index it.

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  5. Add the Windows Search Service under Roles and Features. Then you will be able to redirect your My Documents to a mapped drive on your file server

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