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HP 1500L printer problems

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cnbit

IS-IT--Management
Apr 25, 2001
17
US
Our network setup: NT4 network, (7)Citrix Metaframe XP servers on Win2K server boxes. Servers running SP2 with some newer hotfixes, FR2. Installed an HP 1500L Color Laserjet Printer as a network printer using tcp/ip and printing to a static address. Have many other printers installed the same way, but not laser color printers. All the servers have the same set of software and am pushing out a published desktop using Tricerat. Tried to print to the printer using various Win2K drivers, but none would work. Servers are load balanced with the exception of one, which is my test server. Installed the HP driver on my test server and it seemed to work fine. Ran a few users on it for a few days and didn't seem to have any problems. Went to the other servers to install the driver. First server took it ok. Next 3 errored out and stopped the installation. Went back to the test server and pushed that server out to several people running varied apps. Started having problems with lock-ups, and one of my apps that does not use this printer started having printing problems to other printers.
Sent an e-mail to HP but so far they have ignored me. Anybody out there know of a driver that will work?
 
Thanks. I have contacted the laser department and will see what they have to say.
 
OK, got a lot of help from HP. All my ills were brought on by myself. My servers are hardware RAID 1. One of my servers failed and the bad drive managed to corrupt the good drive. I have a lot of software apps installed and didn't want to build from ground up. Didn't have a new enough version of Ghost to work with win2k, so since all the servers were identical, I just replaced one of the drives in a good server with a new drive and told it to rebuild. Took the drive I had removed, put it in the new server, booted from floppy and ran sysprep. Disconnected network cable and booted server. Named it back to same name as old one, changed static ip address to old one. Removed server from farm using mmc, reconnected to network and did a chfarm. All my software apps worked, but printers didn't. Have over 50 printers installed, so used printmig to backup from good server and restore to bad server. Everything worked until I tried to install the 1500.
What we finally found was that on the good server, the drivers directory structure was winnt\system32\spool\drivers\w32x86 and then some subfolders below that. The 1500 driver is a level 3 driver, so should have installed in the 3 subdirectory. On the problem server, the directory structure had an additional w32x86 folder below the first w32x86 folder. The level 3 drivers were installing into that folder.
I tried everything I could think of, even down to stopping the spooler, stop and start explorer, delete all the folders below drivers, then restore with printmig. Even with a restore, the drivers were installed in the additional w32x86 folder. Something is hard wired in the OS to tell it to do this, but I couldn't find it. Searched the registry for all instances of w32x86 and nothing there, so suppose it is an ini or something like that. The good news is, after I did the restore using printmig the 1500 worked, even if the driver was not in the directory it should have been.
I will look some more for what is causing this if someone can point me in the right direction.
 
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