Recently I have had to reinstalll a driver for my Summagraphics plotter. It is connected to LPT1 on Win 98 side of a partitioned hard drive(the other side is XP). I never had any problem before printing to it but now I get a message
that it "cannot print to LPT1, there is no paper loaded in printer". I have roll paper loaded as I always have but I continually get this message. Can anyone clue me in as to what may be wrong? I have spent 2 full days trying to solve this to no avail.
Sometimes the BIOS setting for LPT (aka parallel) port gets changed. It sounds like it is possible that the bi-directional communications of the port may not be working: and since the computer can't "see" the state of the paper, it is kicking out this error?
To check this, you'll need to open the BIOS, which you have to do at the beginning of the boot process. The usual keys to open the BIOS are either Delete, or the F1 key -- hopefully, you can see which it is for your system. Once you are in, you'll need to navigate (usually using the arrow keys, the Enter key to select, and the Escape key to back out -- and once you find the setting for the LPT port: it should have 3 or 4 different modes. ECP is one that I would try, and if that doesn't work, try ECP/EPP, or possibly Normal.
Be very careful while you are in the BIOS -- do not make any other changes, and be sure to Save the changes when you exit. If you try to reboot and it fails to boot, then you may have to reset the BIOS to all it's default settings. If you want to ask about things that you find in the BIOS, please do!
It is also possible that the parallel cable has gone bad. Do you have another cable to try -- or have you already checked this? Are you sure that the plotter is still working -- is there a self-check plot?
