IR doesn't see parport

Mark Pierson · Post by **Mark Pierson** » Thu Jan 25, 2007 4:54 pm

ehart wrote:run IR off your local hard drive.

Glad to see you got it worked out. IIRC, IR can be run from a network drive, but the gwiopm.sys file has to be in a locally accessible path folder. I've never tried this so I'm not positive.

jetskier · Post by **jetskier** » Thu Jan 25, 2007 4:56 pm

ehart wrote:And the lesson seems to be, run IR off your local hard drive.

Interesting! I just tried it at work where I have IR on a network share and they are greyed out. At home where I have the interface, it is on my local drive and I've never had a problem. I copied IR to my local drive at work and the serial and parallel menu become active again.

jetskier · Post by **jetskier** » Thu Jan 25, 2007 5:00 pm

Mark Pierson wrote:IIRC, IR can be run from a network drive, but the gwiopm.sys file has to be in a locally accessible path folder. I've never tried this so I'm not positive.

Mark,

IR7 was fixed so that the driver files only need to reside in the same folder as IR.exe. Previously, it needed to be in the c:\windows folder otherwise it would give and error message and exit. This wasn't good if you were only using IR for the JP1.x remotes only and didn't need the JP1 driver.

I'm not sure why the current build doesn't allow IR to run the serial and parallel cables when on a network share.

Mark Pierson · Post by **Mark Pierson** » Thu Jan 25, 2007 5:53 pm

jetskier wrote:Previously, it needed to be in the c:\windows folder otherwise it would give and error message and exit.

I don't mean to dispute you but I've used almost every version of IR ever released and have never had the gwiopm.sys driver file in the Windows folder. It's always been in the same folder as IR and I never had any errors. In fact, I just tried 5.04, 6.00, 6.10, and 6.20 with gwiopm.sys in only the local IR folder (not even in my path) and all ran just fine.

jetskier · Post by **jetskier** » Thu Jan 25, 2007 6:58 pm

Let me update after more testing, it was IR7beta2 that had the problem. Previous versions worked fine.

IR7 Beta2 checked the following for gwiopm.sys:
First it checks local system directory
Second it checks in the local windows directory
Last place is the current folder where IR was executed.

For beta2 to load, it had to be in the current folder period. For the device to interface with the remote, it had to be in both the windows folder OR your IR folder needed to be in the OS drive. I have mine in a separate drive.

In beta3, it checks for the driver in the current folder only. It does not check the windows folder anymore. Since the network share has become an issue for the gwiopm.sys, we will need to reimplement this check.

ehart · Post by **ehart** » Thu Jan 25, 2007 7:20 pm

With my old laptop, I was running an older version of IR (and I think successfully running off the network share). I upgraded to IR 7 beta 3 when I went to the new laptop. So it makes sense to me that this issue is new to recent versions.

I think the actual issue may related to "administrative rights" which were pointed out here before. You don't have those on network shares, I would guess. And (now I remember) I was getting a brief "privileged instruction" error as IR started when I was running it off the network share (sorry this didn't come back to me until just now!).

I'm not sure this is an issue worth fixing (unless it's easy to do). It's hard to imagine a case where someone couldn't just put the software on their local drive. It's not at all intrusive (no copying of files or modifying the registry that I can see, no elaborate install routine).

A note in the readme would be useful though.

Thanks for all your work on these programs!