Printers not mapping

[Little-Miss]

Hi, got an ICT suite of 16 machines. They all map their printers using a VBS script but there are a row of 5/6 that wont map them and when you try to print it says that no printers are installed.

What would stop the other 10/11 mapping but not this handful? All the same model machine.

[Andie]

We use VB Script for our printer mapping too. We have had various issues where one or two machines don't map. Are you getting a scripting error on screen when you log in? If you are, try and REM out the line thrown up by the error and see if the script will run then.

It may be an issue with the driver not being pulled to those clients from the server. It's a while since I had to fix that one, but from memory I had to manually reinstall the driver on the server or update the driver on the server, and then the clients started to pull down the drivers. This is on Server 2003 and XP SP3 clients. I think the issue first popped up after installing SP3.

[36Degrees]

Have you tried gpupdate /force on them? We once had an issue where a few computers were still trying to run an old VBS printing script despite picking up all other GPO amendments.

[mac_shinobi]

all the exact same OS on the client machines ie windows xp SP 3 32 bit or what exactly ?

[Little-Miss]

All the same OS.

Will try to force GPO.

Have failed to recreate the error, but i know it exists!!

[Little-Miss]

All the same OS. XP Pro SP3.

Will try to force GPO.

Have failed to recreate the error, but i know it exists!!

[ihaveaproblem]

Do the printers map if you run the script manually on the machine?

[Andie]

Just in case you haven't fixed it, this may help:

Weird: printer mapping issue

[Torrevez]

I have used con2prt.exe in the login script to add printers in the past. It works flawlessly I have found.

Example
\\server\NETLOGON\con2prt /cd \\server\printername

Information on the switches here:
con2prt - Add or Remove Printer Connections

Download link:
Downloads | This is Helpful

[ricki]

Hi

Is this suite of computers laptaps or normal pcs. If its laptops it might be you are using a wifi program by a manufacturer which only starts when you log on which means that you dont pick up gpos and script. Try removing manufacturer program and just load the driver for the wifi and allow windows to control wifi so it starts up when the machine turns on.

Do you computers have 1 gig network cards in them. If they do they might be too quick to pick up the policies and you might have to put a registry setting in to wait for the domain gpos and a gpo setting in to wait for the domain.

Other things that can cause problems are is you have two domain controllers that are not replicating or 2 dns servers that are not replicating.

Dns problems is the root of many problems.

You could try script with ip addresses instead of computer names to see if its dns.

Are the scripts held on a server or on a windows client. If they are on a windows machine they will need to be moved to a server as windows xp can only take 10 connections. I like to put the scripts in my netlogon folder.

Do you use bginfo. If you do try adding the log on server to the list of info they displace it might be a server with a problem.

Is the time the same on the servers and the client. Time being out will stop authentication.

Are all the computers joined to one switch if so try a broken machine somewhere else it might be a switch.

Richard

[Little-Miss]

revisiting this!

Just to add (i am going to work through the above) some computers have mapped some of the printers but they throw up an error (i think about drivers) ive noticed they will be called infant-suite on curricsvr1.domain.pri but if i manually add it, it'll be called infant-suite on curricsvr1 and will work. Does that make someone go "oh i know what THAT is"?

[Michael]

Download the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit and clean the spooler on each of the netbooks. You can run the Cleanspl.exe utility from the server and clean the spooler remotely, then reboot.

This should clear any old printers, spooler errors or registry entries related to the spooler. This has always worked for me.

[cneilson6]

Hi

Have you tried deploying a printer using a gpo rather than through a script?