Windows Search refuses to start

Question

I was working on my tablet the other day, and OneNote 2007 started to complain that it was unable to index my notebooks since the search service was offline. I figured it had crashed or a program had killed it off for one reason or another, so I ended up rebooting the computer.

After the reboot, I went back to working in OneNote and received the search failure message again. I opened up the 'Services' panel and found the Windows Search service. When I attempted to start it up I was greeted with this message:

Windows could not start the Windows Search service on Local Computer.
Error 1392: The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable.

I searched around for a solution, but couldn't find a clear answer. I have never encountered this type of issue in Windows 7, and I am not sure how to safely/correctly repair this problem. I am attaching a few screen shots of the error dialog from Windows, and three related events from event viewer:

Any tips? Where should I start? I'm really lost here.

Answer 1

As stated by Hello71 in his comment to your question, try chkdsk /r first.

You can repair corrupted system files by entering sfc /scannow in the console.

If possible, in Search Indexing you can try to click Advanced and to rebuild the (corrupted?) Index Cache.

Answer 2

See if this article helps:

How to Fix the Start Error for Windows Search Service to Enable the Index in Vista