Has OS X Snow Leopard stopped supporting your printer driver? Here’s a possible solution
Possible solution for you if Snow Leopard no longer supports your printer driver
The press has been reporting that some users have said that their printers (such as some HP printer drivers) are no longer supported after upgrading to OS X Snow Leopard.
At Webopius, we had an old but trusty Hewlett-Packard (HP) Deskjet that had been working perfectly well connected to Macs running Leopard. After we upgraded to Snow Leopard, the Macs were of course much faster, but our HP printer seemed to have been dropped as a supported printer by Snow Leopard.
If your printer isn’t available in Snow Leopard, try this
Here’s what we did to get our HP printer working again.
*important* Please, please be aware that this install worked for us but is done at your own risk, it may overwrite existing printer drivers and Webopius can’t be held responsible for any results.
Step 1.
You will need your original OS X Leopard Install Disc 1.
With Snow Leopard running, insert your OS X Leopard install disc 1.
You should soon see the Leopard ‘Mac OS X Install Disc 1′ window. Click on Optional Installs
You should see two install packages – ‘DVD or CD Sharing Setup.mpkg’ and ‘Optional Installs.mpkg’. Double click on Optional Installs.mpkg
Step 2.
Now, the ‘Install Optional Installs’ window should appear. Click on Continue. Read the license agreement, and if you agree, click Continue and ‘Agree’.
Step 3.
Now, you should see the Custom Install window offering you the chance to install ‘Applications’, ‘Language Translations’ and ‘Printer Drivers’.
They should all be de-selected. If not, make sure none are selected.
Expand the ‘Printer Drivers’ option by clicking on the arrow so that you have a screen looking something like this:
Printer Drivers
Now, choose the printer manufacturer matching your printer (in our case it was Hewlett-Packard) and click continue.
Step 4.
Snow Leopard should now install these additional printer drivers.
Now, within System Preferences print and fax, if you add your printer, Snow Leopard *should* find the correct driver for your printer, or at least one that’s very close and may work.
I went through the steps above and this worked – thank you for your assistance. I have another problem I am using X Lite Softphone to make VOIP calls – snow leopard has knocked the phone out and X Lite advise they are not compatible and date for new version launch is not available. Do you have any similar suggestions as to how I might solve this ?
Comment by ciaran — August 14, 2010 @ 6:06 pm
Thanks,
we installed an ‘old’ driver for a hpdesignjet100 (on snowleopard) it worked!
Comment by Gerard Ugen — November 16, 2010 @ 12:01 pm