Content Sources won't crawl as scheduled

I've encoutered the following problem, in the Manage Content Sources screen, I saw the next crawls scheduled and the time would change for the next one, but Last Crawl Completed never changed. Futhermore, when I went in the Services on Server screen from the Operation Central Administration section, the status for the Office SharePoint server Search service was Starting (for days) and the comment was Required on farm.

Here's how I solved the problem.

• On the SharePoint server, in a command prompt, run the following commands,
1. stsadm -o osearch -action stop
2. stsadm -o osearch -action start -role IndexQuery
• Then, in Central Administration,
1. in the left menu, click Shared Services Administration,
2. open the menu for your Shared Services, and then click on Edit Properties,
3. in the Index Server section, select your Index server,
4. click OK.