“Failed to start service SearchServiceInstance on this server after completing upgrade. Please start it manually.”
The service it is talking about is Office SharePoint Search. PSConfig stays on the “task 8” screen for a while, though it does later complete “successfully”.
Here’s the other symptoms:
When I am logged in as MOSSsa, my Farm Admin account which is a member of Administrators, and I try to start the service I get:
Let’s help the search engines: The error shown is “Error 183: Cannot create a file when that file already exists.”
When I logged in as Administrator (my box/domain admin – this machine is a Domain Controller), I got a different message once (approximately: service started then stopped, which sometimes is OK), but on a subsequent attempt, got the same message as above.
Resolution/Workaround: Add MOSSSearchSvc to the Administrators group, start the service. The service starts successfully. Stop the service, remove it from the group, then restart the service. No complaints. Apparently, it just needed extra permissions long enough to remove the offending file. My guess is that the file was created by MOSSsa since I was logged in as MOSSsa when I ran the Infrastructure Update.
--Michael
UPDATE 24 April 2009: The following day, SharePoint Search stopped again, with the same error. I added it permanently to the Administrators group. A friend of mine pointed out that TechNet does say that the Search Service should be in the Administrators group, so this is actually the recommended configuration.