Hi Marcio,
As far as I am aware there is no silver bullet to address this issue.
Microsoft have serveral resources available for helping plan the SP4
deployment and they discuss testing and what can be done prior to installing
the service pack.
They also state:
"Although Microsoft has a high degree of confidence in this service pack, it
is not possible to test all possible hardware configurations and
line-of-business (LOB) applications that might be present in all
environments. We therefore recommend that you test the service pack in your
environment before you deploy it to all of your users."
Its always a catch 22 situation. The business will fire you if you upgrade
and it goes wrong, or they'll fire you if you don't upgrade in case it goes
wrong.
However in my experience, the best thing to do is review the list of
hotfixes that are applied by the service pack. I think you will find most of
them are already present.
Look at the new ones and what they may affect. Have a quick google around
for known problems with SP4 and your database (There were quite a few
problems around using citrix for example)
On the whole it fixed more things then it broke. In general we have applied
the service pack to every machine in our business running Windows 2000 and
had very limited problems.
Assuming nothing makes you run away in terror, block out a weekend. Take a
good backup and verify it. Run the upgrade and test all services are up and
running properly. That should hopefully leave you with Sunday to yourself.
However if anything goes wrong you can always restore with plenty of time to
spare.
Resources:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/downloads/servicepacks/sp4/spdeploy.htm
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=327194