A8N-SLi Deluxe Driver Load Priority?

[Robert James]

I have a chicken or the egg thing going on here:

Section 5.1 states to load W2k SP4 before installing drivers. How do I
do that when the mobo LAN connector is non-functioning without
installing the LAN drivers?

I suppose I could put in a stand alone PCI LAN card and do it that way,
or is it OK to just load the 35MB LAN driver fron the Asus CD, download
SP4, and then load the rest of the drivers from the CD?

Thank you for your experience.

 

[K-Gun]

it's ok to use the cd driver or better yet the latest driver from the asus
website, followed by sp4 and the remaining updates. You might consider
making a slipstreamed CD with the OS and SP4 integrated. I did this with XP
and SP2 and it saved me a lot of time.

 

[Ben Pope]

I have a chicken or the egg thing going on here:

Section 5.1 states to load W2k SP4 before installing drivers. How do I
do that when the mobo LAN connector is non-functioning without
installing the LAN drivers?

If you have Windows installed, the first thing to do is get your chipset
drivers up to scratch, whilst you're doing that you might as well install
your graphics drivers after that so that your Windows experience is usable.

It would seem a bit silly to install a service pack, which involves lots of
file transfers, without installing the correct driver for your IDE driver.

I suppose I could put in a stand alone PCI LAN card and do it that
way, or is it OK to just load the 35MB LAN driver fron the Asus CD,
download SP4, and then load the rest of the drivers from the CD?

If that driver is the nForce package, then thats currently the best driver
package readily available.

Ben