a busted machine

My set up has been working well for years. It's based on an ancient Xeon processor box which has a parallel port. After a winter of power interruptions the hard disk has died. I have the HAL etc. backed up so restoring LinuxCNC won't be starting from scratch.

That's the background.

The Xeon box is so old it won't boot from a USB ISO (no BIOS option). It doesn't seem to want to boot from a CD either, though it must have at some point (Duh ?). I found a PATA hard disk with LinuxCNC on it and that boots (I have stuff lying around, maybe it was a deliberate backup).

I have a much more modern machine available but it has no parallel port. I bought a add-in parallel port board but I can't seem to get it to work. Has anyone had luck with an add-in parallel port ?

Keeping a 20 year old machine alive is not much of a long-term plan.

looks like I need to read:
wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Parallel_Port_Cards

Humm, maybe time to look at the mesa 7i92 
 

Which parallel port card do you have?

Some work, some don't. I bought half a dozen of the cheapest that I could find a few years ago to survey which worked with LinuxCNC. I think that 4 out of 6 worked. It basically came down to the ones with a small, square chip (that turns out to be a general-purpose device that a driver converts to a paralle port at load time) don't work and the ones with a chip from Oxford or Moschip do work.

So, looking on Amazon:
www.amazon.co.uk/ASHATA-Express-Parallel...efault/dp/B07VHCQ9VN
Probably won't work (or any of that style)
Whereas:
www.amazon.co.uk/KALEA-INFORMATIQUE-Para...901CV/dp/B0085AMA32/
Probably would.

It might be possible to write a linuxcnc-specific driver for the other cards, but it seems a lot of work for a result of limited utility.

I have some of these:-
 

Free if you are in the UK

https://www.sears.com/jeirdus-fbm-pci-jeirdus-parallel-port-pci-card/p-A084572677The one I have, bought in 2021 but never used, is a Jeirdus Parallel Port PCI Card PCI To DB25 LPT Parallel Port Expansion Card.

I'll give it a try this morning but I think it is of the "bad" type. Easy enough to order a good one from Amazon.

I think I should order a

www.amazon.com/gp/product/B091TZPQ1K/ref...d=ATVPDKIKX0DER&th=1

which happens to claim Linux (2.6.X and up) and is from StarTech. It is twice the price but I bought the cheap one, naturally.

I'm in California but thank you for your offer Clive S.

sears is still a company?

I think sears is gone but it was the only place on the web that I could find a reference to the parallel port I have.

I have found other aspects of my very old machine that are busted. I'm moving on and will assemble a new machine with a StarTech PCIe parallel port.

Whoops, I have my backup ini and hal files but I'll be damned if I can figure out where to put them.

It seems LinuxCNC wants to be "helpful" and only likes configurations it has created when starting a new installation.

I just want to install these files and move on... Help !