Cannot get Mac printers to work

B

budsimrin

Member
After upgrading from Windows XP to Windows 7, and Parallels Desktop from ver 8 to 9, my Mac printers no longer work. I have tried ALL of the suggestions I have found on various Parallels and Apple and Windows web sites, to no avail. I have an Intel iMac Core i7 using Mavericks.

I have tried checking the box to "Add all Mac Printers" in Configuration: Hardware: Print. When I do this, my Brother multifunction B&W laser printer and Cannon color inkjet both appear in the Winows 7 "Devices and Printers" list, but hey have the dreaded HP Color LaserJet 2800 Series PS driver. They both print, but they don't have the features I need like 2-sided printing, etc. When I select "Printer properties" after control-clicking the printer's icon in the list, I am able to insert the correct drivers using the Advanced Tab of the Properties window, but then nothing at all prints. The print queues never get populated.

I have tried deselecting the "Add all Mac Printers" box and instead installing the Bonjour Printer Wizard. But I have had to fight the wizard at each step of the process, from installation through getting it to proceed further and further through the process. Mostly it would start by showing my Mac printers, then "thinking" for quite a while before removing them and telling me there are no bonjour printers available. (I first DID set up Bonjour on the Mac side, both in the "Sharing" and the "Printers & Scanners" system prefs.) Then I tried various things. First I gave the wizard full admin privileges. After rebooting and rerunning the wizard and waiting a while longer for it to "think", it finally restored the list of my Mac printers. When I proceeded with the wizard, it would finally crash on the last step, confirmation. I tried this 5 or 6 times, with lots of reboots, etc. I also tried the approach of telling the wizard to run in compatibility mode, but that mode also erased all my icons after initially listing them.

I even tried adding a Printer to the Parallels Configuration: Hardware menu, but that printer also would not print.

Does anyone have any suggestions? I have tried for hours and hours over about a 5-day period.
 
PROBLEM SOLVED.

Parallels Support logged in to my computer today and fixed the problem completely in about 15 minutes. Kudos to the Parallels tech support team, in particular Maria Golubeva.

Actually, earlier in the day I was finally able on my own to get Bonjour partially working. I can't be sure but my previous problem may have been that I had omitted the step of configuring to the Bridged networking mode, by setting Devices: Network1: Bridged Network: Default Adapter. (I may have had the "Shared Network" mode set. Not sure) After that I still had a lot of trouble when a myriad of printer icons showed up, all configured differently. The HP printer was the default and I was prevented from changing it.

Maria quickly discovered that under Virtual Machine: Configure: Hardware: Print that I had forgotten to uncheck "Add all Mac printers". She unchecked that and rebooted Windows. When it finished rebooting, the myriad of duplicate and erroneous printer icons were gone, leaving just my pair of shared printers and one or two pdf printers that I had installed. Amazingly (to me), the infamous HP generic drivers had magically morphed into my Brother and Canon drivers, and all my advanced printer capabilities were now working. Apparently, that is the way it is designed to work by Parallels, but also apparently one has to have ALL of the configurations set correctly before that occurs.

I hope this will help others who are having this problem.
 
I had to dust off my old Parallels Forum password to tell you how much I appreciate your message. I have been working on this problem literally for 8 hours!! That mysterious HP 2800 driver had me screaming!!! I was ready to pack up this Brother printer and return it to Amazon I'm so completely frustrated. But thankfully I found your post & I can now print from both the Mac and Windows "sides" of my computer onto the new Brother.
THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU EVER SO MUCH!!!!:):):)
 
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