24 November 2009

"The Parallel port driver service failed to start" when booting in Hyper-V

At work I've been moving our 2003 Enterprise virtual machines from Microsoft's Virtual PC 2007 to their Hyper-V platform. Generally this process went smoothly, with one exception; when booting, an error dialog was displayed:

The Parallel port driver service failed to start due to the following error:
The service cannot be started, either because it is disabled or because it has no enabled devices associated with it.


After a bit of searching, I discovered there is a registry setting that will turn off this message. Using regedit, navigate to:

   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Parport

and set:

   Start = 4

Viola, no more error message during boot up.

Reference: Microsoft Support (this article references Vista / 2008 Server, but it worked fine with 2003 Enterprise SP2)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

What a great resource!