The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Nov. 02, 1999
Filed:
Nov. 12, 1997
Richard Ian Knox, Renfrewshire, GB;
Sohail Syyed, Strathclyde, GB;
International Business Machines Corp., Armonk, NY (US);
Abstract
An error recovery technique is provided which is used during the automatic installation of software on a client data processing system from a connected server data processing system. The installation process is made up of a plurality of operations executing on the client, for example format client disk drive, load DOS, load Windows etc. Monitoring the successful completion of each of these operations on the client is watchdog timer code which preferably takes the form of device driver software received from the server system early in the installation process. At the beginning of each operation, a preselected time value is written to a counter in the watchdog timer, this time value representing a time period which is greater than the time normally taken for the operation to complete. If the counter expires before the operation is complete (if for example the server system or network fails), the client invokes an error recovery procedure which may for example involve rebooting the client.