Both printer and 9 pin serial ports not wor...

What has changed? One solution is to go into BIOS when you first turn on your PC hit <del> key. Make sure the ports are enabled. The second solution is to make sure you didn't add a device with serial ports or something which is sharing the same IRQs, which is 3 4 and 7 traditionally (for COM1/2 and parallel port).

If you tried all this and it doesnt work, then somehow the chip on the motherboard which handles these (the UART chip) has broke, you need to replace the motherboard or buy a card with serial and parallel ports on it (this should be quite cheap, ie 10-20 dollars).