winpe and lpt/printer port

[pintoexplode]

Hey All,

First time on this forum and I'm hoping I can get some answers for a winpe problem. It seems like for some reason the lpt/printer port is some how not avtivated in pe. It looks like the driver for the port is parport.sys for windows xp, and It's the same for pe too, but it only shows the driver for the serial port and not the parallel port. I believe the driver is actually loaded, but maybe by default the port is turned off? Has anyone heard of this before? Anyone have a fix for it? My company had a VB script written to interact with a custom donggle that plugs into the parallel port and we're using winpe, but nothing's happening. everything works fine under win xp, so we've tried to narrow down the problem to the actual port settings in pe. any help much appreciated. Thanks, Pinto

[StuckInTexas]

I ran into the same problem. It was really weird, because the INF files were there, but it just would not load the driver information into the registry, under HKLM. Here is how I got around it:

1) Start the parallel port service:

net start parpor

2) Use devcon (from MS) to install the inf file (that is already on the machine) to the parallel port.

devcon install x:\windows\inf\msports.inf ACPI\PNP0400

After I do those two steps, all my parallel port programs work perfectly.