Andrea Allred has some lessons learned from a troublesome service pack upgrade:
Here are a few of the fun errors that we saw.
“Script level upgrade for database ‘master’ failed because upgrade step ‘SSIS_hotfix_install.sql’ encountered error 942, state 4, severity 25. This is a serious error condition which might interfere with regular operation and the database will be taken offline. If the error happened during upgrade of the ‘master’ database, it will prevent the entire SQL Server instance from starting. Examine the previous errorlog entries for errors, take the appropriate corrective actions and re-start the database so that the script upgrade steps run to completion.”
There are some good lessons here.