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.
Not quite that often – at least 0.01% are faulty memory.