Re: Win2K3 Servers continue reverting from SP2 to SP1

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From: chriske911 <chriske911nosp@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2008 10:25:35 +0100

Allyn has brought this to us :

We are using voluming licensing on the servers, and the servers don't have a recovery partition.

I had another thought: We needed to free up drive space, so I deleted backup directories under the Windows directory of the form "$NTUninstallKB...$". Is any information maintained in these that might cause this behavior?

"chriske911" wrote:

After serious thinking Allyn wrote :
We have a few Win2K3 servers that have had SP2 installed on them a couple times. SP2 will show up for a while, maybe a few months, and in the process of doing some maintenance we'll see they have reverted to SP1. We're puzzled at this, as no one in IT is removing them. Has anyone else experienced this?

Thank you.

with OEM servers or workstations there can be a recovery partition that holds a profile of a working system
could it be that the SP2 version of the system is not very stable and the recovery software therefore reverts it backt to pre SP2 config?

grtz

no, not AFAIK
those are just the installers necessary to reverse a patch or service pack
for a servicepack it is called $NtServicePackUninstall$, for patches it is called $NtUninstallKBxxxxxx$

it is even stranger that it reverts the installation if you deleted the uninstaller

could it be that it is just the label that is wrong and not the actual installation
you can check this by looking at versions of files or by the following tool: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/279631

grtz

.

References:
- Re: Win2K3 Servers continue reverting from SP2 to SP1
  - From: chriske911

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