Printers mysteriously disappear from print server 1

[ScottCGI]

I come in this morning and receive complaints about printing so naturally I look at our print server and I see that ALL of our printers are gone under start, settings, printers! How does that happen? Is there a quick way to restore that from backup tape?


Scott

 

[ScottCGI]

Also-- I did look under C:\winnt\system32\spool\drivers\w32x86 and all of those files are still there. But the printer icons themselves are gone.

Scott

 

[ScottCGI]

Found the problem... the print spooler service stopped. I restarted it and that solved the problem but I had it setup to automatically restart should it stop so that concerns me.

Scott

 

[lwlrmk]

I had the exact problem. Found restarting was a temporary fix. Happend 2 times so far. Did you find a fix?

 

[danomac]

A bad or corrupted print driver can cause this. In my experience HP drivers are horrible - they caused our server's print spooler to crash all the time.

Try looking in the error log to see what the last action was prior to the spooler stopping - this should help figure out what driver caused the problem.

 

[ScottCGI]

I did not find a fix but luckily it hasn't happened since and we are replacing this print server next week with a new windows 2003 server. That's a good point about the corrupt driver though. I'll keep that in mind.

Scott