Printer driver was not installed. Operation could not be completed.

[tasdevil67]

Installed Windows XP Professional from scratch.
Installed SP2 and all security fixes. During the installation process of SP2...I received the Blue Screen of Death (Shocker)....this may have been what caused this problem initially.

Tyring to add a printer to my system, the print wizard would start and ask me all the typical questions. When it got the to the end of the wizard where I had to press 'Finish', the 'Copying Files...' screen popped up for a blink of an eye and then I got the error:

Printer driver was not installed. Operation could not be completed.

The print spooler was running. There were no errors in the event viewer and no other errors popped up. I tried everything that everyone recommended as I really did not want to reinstall from scratch.

What worked for me was to go to the c:\windows\driver cache\i386 directory. There were two files there: driver.cab and sp2.cab

I renamed sp2.cab to tassp2.cab and when I tried to re-add a printer....everything worked. I renamed tasp2.cab back to sp2.cab and tried to add another printer...and it failed with the same error.

I am not sure why....it took me so long to figure this out....that I really don't feel like figuring out why...I'll just assume that sp2.cab is corrupted.

 

[wutt]

Do you have the printer installation cd? If so try installing from that if not download it from the manufacturer (if possible) and try that.
I've seen many units that have a hang up with printer drivers but instal great from the cd, floppy or download. Good Luck
wutt

 

[tasdevil67]

I tried that as well. No matter what I did, I could not get it to work. Renaming the sp2.cab in the C:\Windows\Drivers Cache\i386 directory worked for me.

Installing from the CD failed...downloading the driver from the net failed....I tried different ports...different drivers....any combination of the wizard options...all failed. I cleaned out any existing printers...I renamed the print spool directory....I ran scf /scannow....I removed existing files from the spool directory.....all failed.

These were all of the suggestions from other posts on the net related to this problem that may have worked for others but failed for me. I saw that some people tried those fixes too and didn't have an answer. Some just re-installed.

I just posted that response to let people know of another alternative that could possibly work.

I'm up and running now...hope my post helps someone else in need.