Printing from XP/2003 to 2008 R2 Problems

[willv28]

We have a new Hyper-V server running 2008 R2. One of the VMs is a print server. We installed one of our network printers on it. Obviously the x64 drivers were installed first. The x86 drivers installed successfully, so they're both there. Then we tried to connect to the shared printer from XP and 2003 machines. It connect to the printer fine, but we cannot print. A test page brings up "Test page failed to print." error and the 'Print' box is grayed out in any application when you select this particular printer.

Does anyone have any ideas where the trouble might be? This is our first experience with 2008.

[bio]

personally i think this is a driver issue.. i was wondering which brand printer you have ?

bio..

[willv28]

It is a Xerox Phaser 6180.

[bio]

did you try the xerox global printer driver ?

bio..

[Nixphoe]

Start from the top down. Can you print from the server first?
If you can, like Bio said, good chance it's a print driver. Delete the driver from the server and reinstall it fresh. If you're still having issues, remove the printer and driver from the workstation and reconnect it and try again.

[willv28]

I had not tried the global print driver. Printing directly from the server worked fine. I was trying a few iterations of the x86 driver, none worked or would install except the official one. I installed both the x64 and x86 global print driver and it did work. I bet if I manually replaced the x64 driver that was initially installed with the one from Xerox directly it would have also worked.

Funny, normally I don't trust the built in Windows drivers and install my own. I was only doing that for the x86 driver. Must have been a version mismatch.

[bio]

Good to see it solved... We migrated our print servers to windows 2008 R2 as well.. Also ran into some issues like mentioned by you. IT was allways a driver issue.. Universal drivers will work fine for HP and Ricoh printers.

bio..

[willv28]

Yeah, fewer drivers to install and everything. We're going to slowly migrate the printers over to the hyper-v server and ditch the old server. It'll fail eventually anyway. Also, we have a massive power consumption issue which leads to a heat issue because there's no cooling... The "data center" wasn't designed for that and our school is too cheap to do things right.

[bio]

The "data center" wasn't designed for that and our school is too cheap to do things right.

hehe i know the problem

[charles54]

Microsoft recently announced the release of Windows Small Business Server 2008 Standard and Premium Editions scheduled for release on November 12, 2008.

The release of Server 2008 marks one of the most significant upgrades Microsoft has made to its server line of software. Perhaps only the release of Windows 2000 was a more significant advance to the product line. Before the release of Windows 2000, only NT 4.0 was available for servers.

The new technologies present within Server 2008 will prove to be more beneficial to businesses than previous releases.