parallel port -m7i43 not starting up

I have a system which ran over 10 years ago under emc2 (I believe on Ubuntu . It worked great, but I let it set for years and it has fallen into a bad state. The computer had to have a new hard drive, and all of the boards ( I used 3 Mesa boards fed by a m7i43) were very dirty. I cleaned them off as best I could. I then got a new hard drive, but decided to load the latest software (Debian 9, Linuxcnc 2.7.14.) When I had problems, I also tried Debian 7 with the same Linuxcnc.

When I try to start up Linuxcnc, with my slightly modified hal files, I always seem to get a complaint that the parport is busy or the 7i43 or parport is timing out. The m7i43 init and done lights are going out after the Linuxcnc starts to run.

Attached is data on the failure this afternoon. It is on an old desktop.

Neither the loadrt hm2_7i43 line, nor the loadrt hal_parport line specify an address for their parports, so it is likely that they are trying to use the same one.

Are you really using two parports, one for the 7i43 and one for GPIO?

The man for hm2_7i43 states the default is x0378 for the base address, +0X0400 for the hi address, and epp_wide =1. According to dmesg, that is all true. I was not aware I had a loadrt parport in the code at all. Maybe it was required for the very old code? I don't know. I will try this without the parport load.

I tried using 7i43_big on the same hardware, and I got very similar error messages, but linuxcnc did not shut down. Of course, it would never run, but it shouldn't return message like failed to load, I would think.

All of my I/O goes through the 7i43. I have a 7i37 and a 7i64 coming off P3 of the 7i43, and a 7i33 coming off P4.

It is hard to tell from here, but I think it might be that the problem is loading hal_parport on top of the 7i43.

The 7i43 appears to load correctly.

I would agree, the 7I43 communication is working and probably broken by the parallel port driver load. (you can see the IDRom read works but communication falis just about the time the hal_parport driver loads)

I would comment out the loadrt hal_parport line and try again

You're both right thanks for looking at this. I went back to my old files, and found only the one I used had that loading of the parallel port. Thank you, andypugh, and PCW, for the quick response. In the future, I'll have to look over these files more carefully before I post. I didn't get completely running, because I got an error about a tainted classicladder file. I'm going to try and research this before I post about it.