🔎 Restore Windows Start Search on Tiny11 (Standard)

[Eladriagon]

Tiny11 rips out Windows feature SearchEngine-Client-Package (either directly or indirectly) which is required for the Start Menu search feature to work.

Note that SearchEngine-Client-Package also likely includes some sort of online search/phone-home capabilities – disabling those is outside the scope of this post. 🙂

Warning

This guide does not work for Tiny11 Core! (The absence of WinSxS basically cripples Windows...)

Get a Retail Windows 11 ISO

Get a legitimate, unmodified copy of Windows 11 retail. You don't need to worry about what edition it is, but the language should match your installation.

Mount the ISO using Windows Explorer.

Find your Windows Image Index

Note

In all commands after this one, replace D:\ with the drive letter that Windows mounted the ISO onto.

Run your terminal with elevated/administrator rights.

You'll need to know which image index corresponds to your current install. (For example, for Windows 11 Pro, at least for me, the index was 6.) To find your index, run:

dism /Get-WimInfo /WimFile:D:\sources\install.wim

Match it to your edition of Windows.

Restore Search

Mount the install image using DISM, specifying the correct index number (replace X with your image number from above).

mkdir C:\winmount > nul
dism /Mount-Wim /WimFile:D:\sources\install.wim /index:X /MountDir:C:\winmount /ReadOnly

Now, to restore search:

sfc /scannow
dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth /Source:D:\sources\install.wim /LimitAccess
dism /Online /Enable-Feature /FeatureName:"SearchEngine-Client-Package" /All /Source:D:\sources\install.wim /LimitAccess

And register the service with the correct startup:

sc config WSearch start=delayed-auto

You can optionally run:

sc start WSearch

However it's probably already running, so there's no need.

Finally, to unmount the image:

dism /unmount-wim /mountdir:C:\winmount /discard

You can also delete C:\winmount if you'd like (it should be empty).

rmdir C:\winmount

Reboot for good measure, and enjoy working Start Menu search once again! 🎉