I have a large full text index (30 millions records) that is
populating on a live server (they are just doing without the full text
search stuff for now) and the index goes into shutdown mode.  What is
that????  Last time it did this i stopped and started the mssearch
service and it started back up again.  The only problem is that when
it completed last time the number of records in the index was like 8
million.  I did a test and a bunch of the rows did not get into the
population even though it supposedly finished correctly.  So I am
hesitant to restart the service since I'm afriad it will not
completely fill the index again.

This is SQL 2000 on a Windows 2003 entprise box.  But not in a
cluster.  It's a stand alone machine.  4 proc, 16 gigs on the machine.
13 of the gigs used by sql.  The box does stay pretty busy but not
completely bogged down.

Ryan