Thinkpads Forum

I work for a Small Company that outsources it's IT staff to larger companies and one of our larger companies is undergoing a PC Refresh which in turn the owner of our company is buying all the Used computers with intent to resell, my job is to build standard images for all these computers as part of them being preped for Resale, and I've got an issue with the 600x it appears that it has an IRQ Conflict with the Standard Printer Port and the ECP Printer Port (LPT1) wanting to both use the same IRQ. Now, I've made an image of this before and had the same issues with the Intel Bus Master as everyone else I've seen postin on here, but what I don't see is anyone having this new issue, that I didn't have previously. This rebuild of the image only comes to solve an issue with the fact that the laptops lockup after being on battery for 2 minutes, that issue is resolved, but is leaving me with this freakishly odd Printer Port issue. I don't understand why it's doing it and I've gone over every utility on IBM's site and I'm still coming up short. To be more specific it's a 2645-4EU. If anyone has an insight on this it'd be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Robby

This seems strange to me too. I do not have a solution, but I can tell you how the printer shows up in Device Manager on my primary 600X (2645-9WU) running Windows 98SE.

Under Ports:
Printer Port (LPT 1)
- IRQ 7
- Resources: 03BC-03BF
- Driver version 4.10.1998 from Microsoft (4-23-1999)

There is no ECP Printer Port (LPT1).

I think the reason you are getting a duplicate entry might have to do with how your BIOS is set up through the ThinkPad Configuration Utility. In the ThinkPad Configuration utility you can adjust the setting for your ports by clicking the icon "Parallel Port". From there you can set your port to different operating modes: bidirection, ECP, EPP, uni-direction. My port is set to "bidirection". I think you should only have one LPT1 port installed: either ECP or EPP or standard or whatever.

Perhaps the conflict you are seeing on your machine relates to having changed the operating mode after installing the OS? Or imaging a disk that was setup for a machine set to a different operating mode?

Phil.

The IRQ conflict I've seen with Thinkpad 600's is always with the Hard Drive controllers. Not the printer ports.. How many printer ports does it have (Most laptops have one) so the printer port either is, or is not, an ecp port.

(The other port, if it has one is the Infra Red port, and that has to be enabled)

The program APM2APM.REG fixes the hard drive issue, it may already be on the hard drive, if not it's on the Thinkpad Services disk for your model

I've had trouble with the infra-red port being enabled at the same time as the modem before in the 600 series. Just disable it...rare you'd use it anyway.

From the first time Windows 98 boots I get the SM Bus Master Controller issue, as well as the printer port issue, I had both the same issues before, and somehow by the grace of god I fixed them, but no idea what I did to fix it, you do so many things in a row.. and it's suddenly working right, it's extremely odd. I fixed the SM Bus Master with the apm2apm fix, but that didn't fix the other issue. I disabled the Infrared Port, and removed all the Ports out of the device manager and rebooted it and everything was fine.. how odd. Thanks for the attempts to help though, always appreciated.

...seems to me that we used to use a fix of some sort that is different than what you are mentioning (another supplement file)...with Japanese windows it was called the "Ito Fix" because evidently Mr. Ito figured it out...anyway, I've located it and it's here if you already haven't used this:
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... 8sfdit.exe

This "Ito Fix" I think is just part of the standard Windows 98 Supplement Files disk. I couldn't access it through the link you provided, but here is an alternative link:
http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.ws ... IGR-4FJ3SC

This file is also available from the regular ThinkPad 600 file matrix under the heading "Windows Install Supplements".

But I don't think any of the files on the supplement disk are designed to fix any problem related to Port assignments. The Supplement Disk for the ThinkPad 600 on Windows 98 contains the following items:
- IBM LCD Color Profile support
- Texas Instruments PCI CardBus support
- APM Installation support

And I think those are the only issues that the supplement files address.

Phil.

To illusi0ns2: Glad you've fixed the problem.

Based on your description, I still think that the problem was related to a conflict between the "operating mode" of the parallel port on your machine as compared to the drivers that were included in your disk image install. The 600X (and many other ThinkPads I think) allows you to control how your parallel port behaves by adjusting a setting in the BIOS. If you set it to behave as an ECP port, then Windows and other programs will "see" it as an ECP port. If you set it to behave as a standard port, then I think it will be seen that way in any hardware identification processes.

I disabled the Infrared Port, and removed all the Ports out of the device manager and rebooted it and everything was fine.. how odd.

This no longer sounds odd to me. This is how Windows 98 is supposed to work. If you remove all the devices from your install, then it will redetect them. This is a useful troubleshooting step if you have conflicts with different devices under the same category. Sometimes Windows can resolve a resource conflict if it is allowed to redetect the installed devices and reassign the IRQs and memory input/output locations.

In your case, I don't really know how you did your install in the first place, but you have mentioned rebuilding an image or standard image for the notebooks. If you install Windows 98SE from a genuine install CD, I don't think you will come upon this Port conflict, because Windows will only find one parallel port and it will correctly identify it as either a standard port or an ECP port, based on your BIOS settings. I think you ran into the port conflict because you used an image that included the installation info for the wrong operating mode of your parallel port. Then when you booted the machine, your registry had information for a device (your ECP printer port) that it could no longer find, and it found a new device (your standard printer port) and installed the correct drivers for it. This left your device manager with a conflict, since these two devices actually use the same resources -- and indeed, they are the same device.

Getting back to your disk images, I think you may have this same problem with other 600X machines, if those machines have their parallel port operating mode set to different things in their BIOS. If I'm right, then the only way to avoid this will be to ensure that all the machines have the parallel port set the same way before installing the image drive. You may be able to do this through some kind of BIOS initialization or something, since there is no doubt a default setting for this, but I am not sure what it is.

Phil.