THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE SBS "DIVA"

While I'm a person who recommends that you don't have to be first to install a Service pack, lately I've seen a little bit of a disturbing trend where someone will get a bad install or a BSOD and they will roll back to pre service pack without doing more investigation.

First some rules when it comes to the worse case scenerio of a BSOD.  That to me is not necessarily the worse thing you can happen to your system.  Worst case is that the system doesn't boot and provides no clues at all.  A BSOD with a dump file left on the box means that you can debug what freaked out the system.  A BSOD on one system doesn't mean that you'll get a BSOD on another system.

http://blogs.technet.com/petergal/archive/2006/03/23/422993.aspx

BSOD's 99.999999999% of the time are a third party driver.  Firing up the debugger and running it more often than not will point you in the right direction of what needs to be tracked down.

Do take a backup.

Do plan.

Do consider a Service pack a time that you need to also update the bios on the server, the nic drivers and in general look over the other "stuff" of a server that may need updating.

Don't willy nilly install it without planning.  But one person's story of a bad or failed install may not be indicative of the experience you have.  Not all servers are alike.  Not all systems have the same drivers.

So a story about one person's incident may not be signs of across the board issues.