I have this system where the scanner is supposed to be on the same line as the printer. The scanner is supposed to be connected to the computer, and the printer is supposed to be connected to the scanner in a daisy-chain type of arrangement. This was working fine until this morning when I tried to put my zip drive between the scanner and the printer. Then the scanner stopped working, although the zip drive and the printer werre OK.
The system says it’s unable to find a scanner.
I took out the Zip drive and reconnected the printer to the scanner, and the scanner still doesn’t work.
The printer works fine, though. How can it not find the scanner when it has to go through the scanner to get to the printer, which works
Are we talking about a parallel port interface? I had mucho trouble with a previous computer where I had daisy-chained a PP printer, scanner, and tape backup. Later I learned that PP devices don’t handle this very well, and that it’s best to have no more than 6 feet of cable between the computer and any PP device. (Techies, feel free free to debunk this; it’s what I was told, and my experience bore it out.) On my next machine I had extra PP ports installed so each device could have its own port. When each device needed replacing, I switched to USB. Much happier.
Parallel ports were not designed to dasiy chain. I would think you would have gread difficulty getting 3 devices to work on it. As for your scanner problem - turn off everything and unplug the scanner then bring everything back on and it should work.
If you must use the parallel port for all these devices do what handy suggests and get another parallel port card. The ZIP and the scanner drivers will likely butt heads if sharing the same IRQ 7 of the parallel port, especially since drivers for these devices are often designed to to stay resident in memory even if the devices are not in use. Separate port = less trouble in the long run.