tlug: parport woes

[Tony Laszlo <laszlo@example.com>]

A little update to my parallel port / tape drive woes. 

(*** my questions are below at the next "***" marks )

I hooked up the tape drive (Colorado Trakker 250) to 
the parallel port of another pc, ran Win95, installed 
the dos program that comes with it and confirmed 
that it is operational. 

I did the same thing on the Linux box (booting Win95). 
Much to my surprise, I discovered that the system was 
not able to recognize the device (using the dos software 
to determine the status of the tape drive caused the 
drive to emit its usually noises, but this continued 
for more than 30 minutes). 

So, I picked up an ISA multi i/o card which had a 
parallel and serial port (couldn't find a used one, 
got a new one in the end). 

Installed this, setting the parallel port jumper to 
irq 7 and irq 9, alternatively. 

I confirmed that the serial port works straightaway 
under Linux. 

Dos was able to recognize the tape drive using 
the new parallel port. 

With Linux, I am still more or less where I was 
last week, except this week, I am telling parport 
that it needs to be io=0x278 irq=7 (or irq=9, 
depending on the jumper position - /etc/conf.modules 
reads: 
options parport_pc io=0x278 irq=7 ...or 9)

when parport.o and parport_pc.o are inserted, 
cat /proc/parport/0/hardware gives the (correct?) 
irq and mode reading:
base:   0x278
irq:    7
dma:    none
modes:  SPP,PS2,EPP


*** This machine's BIOS settings gave me the 
following parallel port options for lpt1 (and none 
for lpt2, accept once or twice, after I switched 
the lpt1 setting to 0x278 irq7): 
0x378 irq7 
0x278 irq7
disabled 

I have tried all of them but, frankly, don't 
really know what I should be doing to be able 
to skirt the original parallel port which is 
broken and use the second one that I just put 
in. 

*** what should the jumper setting be? 
do I need to worry about the bios setting (note 
that it doesn't give me anything but irq 7 and, 
doesn't <usually> mention anything other than 
lpt1). 

I notice that the ppa.o module couldn't be inserted 
adn the zipdrive wasn't even recognized when attached 
to the new parallel port (unlike last time). So, 
I assume that there is something wrong with the 
jumper/bios settings. 





-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Next Meeting (w/ YLUG): June 16 (Fri) 19:00 Mizonoguchi Marui Family 12F
Next Technical Meeting: July 8 (Sat)  13:30 Topic: TBA
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
more info: http://www.tlug.gr.jp        Sponsor: Global Online Japan