If a bunch of updates are needed and proposed by Windows Update, they can all be installed at once with only one reboot even if several of them would have wanted a reboot if done separately. That much hasn't changed. And the need to separately execute "qchain" was done away with long ago when qchain functionality was embedded in the update installer.
Carl -----Original Message----- From: Ben Scott [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, August 12, 2009 1:30 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: clarification on sp level and patching On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 12:02 PM, Jeff Bunting<[email protected]> wrote: >> Just remember if you apply a service pack to a server, without re-applying >> the post SP updates the fixes you put in place, will be undone when the >> service pack is applied, > > Is this still true? I thought the $hf_mig$ directory was now used to prevent > this from occurring. I haven't reapplied a SP in quite awhile to verify one > way or the other. That is indeed the way it is supposed to work. When you install a hotfix, all the possible versions of the files are copied to $hf_mig$, and when a later update needs to install a newer version, the appropriate hotfixed file is supposed to be migrated from there. I forget when this was introduced. XP SP2? 2000 SP4? I'm not sure about Vista/2008 and it's "new servicing stack". Service Packs aren't cumulative releases anymore, so who knows what else changed? While we're on the subject: Reportedly, with Vista and 2008R2, QCHAIN and its functionality is gone. If an update says to reboot, Thou Shalt Reboot. Don't defer the reboot and attempt to install more updates. So says a Microsoft support engineer: "If you have an update that pends a reboot, please, reboot the machine. Because of the way the servicing stack works, we need to flush out information that is pertinent to that updates installation first before we can do additional servicing. This can, and often does, lead to corruption. You cannot QCHAIN updates like you could in the past." http://blogs.technet.com/joscon/archive/2009/07/15/addressing-some-comments- given-so-far.aspx How nice. The claim is things didn't always work with QCHAIN, either. Great. -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
