32bit Printer Drivers on an x64 Windows 2008 Print Server
Continuing on with my Hyper-V Virtual Machine installations, I moved onto a Windows 2008 Print Server after yesterday I spoke about How To Migrate a Windows 2003 DHCP Server to a Windows 2008 Server. These virtuals are x64 based VM’s and as I found out after adding the Print Services Role to the server and then installing a printer to share and connecting to that printer from a 32bit XP Client the server didn’t have appropriate drivers installed and asked me to locate the driver files.
90% of my printers are HP ones so I went to the HP website and downloaded the most recent driver, it turns out they have a “HP Universal PCL 6″ driver. Now this driver appears to do, as the name suggests, provide the correct drivers to all HP Printers!.
To get the x86 drivers onto the x64 Windows 2008 Server you need to connect to the server from the x86 client and open up the printer and faxes share. THen from the File Menu select Server Properties, then from the Driver Tab add the x86 drivers that you downloaded, and they will then be uploaded to the server.
Another catch here is that both x86 and x64 drivers MUST have the same name. If they have the same name, they will appear automatically in additional drivers for both architectures in your printer’s sharing properties.
when i try to add it from the server itself it asks for ntprint.ini from a x86 media.
when i do it from the client, it says operation not supported.
How did you get it working?
printerguy
11 Dec 08 at 3:06 pm
printerguy
From the Client machine go to your printer and faxes share on your Print Server, then File > Server Properties > Drivers Tab then browse for your 32bit Driver files
Daniel Anderson
11 Dec 08 at 3:12 pm
i already tried that and got “operation not supported”.
i ended up finding an article about using vista sp1 and the command printbrui.exe to export and import the printer drivers. seems to have work. cheers
printerguy
12 Dec 08 at 11:47 am
Great method, i’ve been looking for a way of getting this working with 2008 64-bit and XP clients.
many thanks!
Alex
24 Apr 09 at 2:55 am
I ran into this issue to, was a real hassle. Clearly some-one at Microsoft was not thinking about some of the routiene things that Admins need in order to support a LAN.
The real killer is that the 32-bit and 64-bit driver names have to match EXACTLY. Not surprising that many manufacturers are not 100% consistant about the names they give for 32-bit and 64-bit drivers for thier devices.
For instance you may run into an issue where the 64-bit driver is called “Dell 3100cn PCL6″ and the 32-bit version is named “Dell Color Laser 3100cn PCL6″, clearly drivers for the exact same device, and Server 2008 will still balk at associating it with the printer.
I was actualy able to make this work by going in and physicaly editing the .inf files for the drivers with notepad and making the text for the names of the drivers match EXACTLY. Surprisingly, that actualy worked.
Mel
1 May 09 at 4:52 am