On a recent 2013 Foundation install, I had a recurring
problem. The client wasn't willing to give the installation
account full SA privileges, so we asked for the dbcreate role
and thought it was enough (hint: it's not). Make sure you add
the securityadmin role as well. If you don't, you'll probably
end up with an error like "The search service is not able to
connect to the machine that hosts the administration
component". In Standard or Enterprise, you can rip out the
offending service and add a new service application, but
Foundation is a bit more black-box in its
limited-functionality approach. To resolve this error without
a complete reinstall, I did the following: 1) Ensure that the
securityadmin role has been granted. 2) In Central
Admin->Application Management->Manage Service
Applications, select the Search Service Application and delete
it. 3) On the SharePoint SQL Server box, delete all databases
with "Search" in the name. 4) Rerun the SharePoint Products
Configuration Wizard. At this point you should have a working
Search Service again.