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.