From: "Geo." 

"Mike N."  wrote in message
news:43lus21u4tebdvp0ecr25bc7bgsqgl9ihj{at}4ax.com...

>>I was a beta for all the service packs from the beginning up thru W2Ksp4.
>>I
>>even ran them on production machines after initial testing. The procedure
>>was backup to tape, update and pray, anything fails to work quickly
>>restore
>>the OS partition from tape.
>
>   You were not able to uninstall the patches?

I usually wouldn't risk it as beta means the uninstall is as trusted as the
install, on my test system I even had a second boot install just in case a
patch resulted in a bsod upon boot.

>   An image backup on  a live machine won't work if there are DBs on the
> machine being updated.

I backup an sql server that runs an ISP, sql is a database isn't it?
 Actually there are three ways you can go there, you can dump the
db and backup the dump or you can shut the db down during the backup or you
can have the db replicated to a second machine and backup the second
machine after shutting down the replication. There's a forth way, buy a
backup program that can backup the database live but imo that is far more
risky and expensive than it's worth.

Geo.

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5