"sent to printer" but not printing

Background info about our system, Windows 2003 server running shared printers with papercut on the system.

Over the past 2 days we've been having problems with the printers not printing, i have looked into the printer logs and it's saying "sent to printer" but nothing comes out. When things print fine we just get "Printed".

Have tried restarting server, pc's, and printers still same thing. Restarting the server works for a period but soon goes back to the same problem.

Anyone come across this before?

Does papercut have a denied jobs log? That's my first port of call in PMP - it's called the Savings Report there.

Papercut is allowing the prints through, when it doesn't it will pause the print job rather than "sent to printer".

I would check if the printer(s) in question have multiple paper trays and if they do, make sure the paper source is set to "Auto".

Open up a Word document for example, then click File > Print > Properties button and check the paper source.

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Originally Posted by Michael

I would check if the printer(s) in question have multiple paper trays and if they do, make sure the paper source is set to "Auto".

Open up a Word document for example, then click File > Print > Properties button and check the paper source.

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aaah - paper size! That's a good one! Check it's not looking for Letter paper by default instead of A4 - I've had that few times :(

It's all just stopped again, restarted server, selected all the "sent to Printer" ones and restarted them, they have all printed. I think it's more a spooler error than printer one.

I had a similar problem recently with some Canon printers. The jobs were pausing for absolutely no reason and was forced to manually resume them.

I found that as well as the Print Spooler, there were some other Canon related print services. By stopping them all, then re-enabling the services, the problem was fixed.

Depending what make/model printer(s) you have, I'd check for other services on the print server.

This sounds a bit like an Issue we have had, which seemed to be related to printer drivers.

The fix we use is to stop the print spooler service and empty the windows\system32\spool\PRINTERS folder then re-start the spooler.

I wrote this a ways back that may be of use to help clear stalled jobs..

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/showthread.php?t=6860

If you've got your windows\system32\spool\PRINTERS folder on your server's C: drive then check you're not short of disk space there as your print server will stop functioning if you get a few large stalled jobs filling up the last few GBs of space. Happened to me a while ago (I know, I should have been checking my server disk space regularly....).
You can move the spooler folder to another drive if this is the case (Printers & Faxes / Server properties / Advanced).

Disk space can also effect spooing, do the PCs have sufficient drive space? Dont ask how I found it out :p

Damn, beat me to it :p

We did used to have a problem with disk space but now on a new drive with 70gb free currently.

Have cleared out the spool files and restarted all the services so will wiat and see what happens.