I’ve had this on-again, off-again problem with my computer not seeing my printer. I’ve torn my hair out over this, because it seemed so arbitrary. At first, I blamed ZoneAlarm for blocking my USB ports[1], and in temporarily disarming ZA, I ended up getting my check card information stolen. So, that didn’t end well, though I thought I had the problem narrowed down to ZA.
Not so.
I turned everything on this morning, and once again, my printer was off-line. Aaack! I tried everything I could think of, retracing my cybersteps yesterday to try to figure out what might have made my printer invisible. Bupkis. So I did a system restore to yesterday. Printer still off-line. Undid the restore and picked a point further back. Printer still off-line. Undid that restore and tore out some more hair. At this point, I’m completely out of ideas.
I finally decided that I’d better just spend the day doing a major back-up, wipe my hard drive, and reinstall everything. That’s not what I had on my agenda for the day. Ugh.
I took the lid off my spindle of discs, which sits in front of my computer tower. And, what did I see? The Compact Flash card from my camera sitting in the card reader. Hmmm. As you may have noticed, I haven’t been taking many pictures lately. Also, lately, my printer (until this morning) has been working fine. Hmmm, again.
You may or may not recall that when I first got this computer, I was extra clueless and hooked up the internal card reader before installing Windows. Windows, because it hates me, assigned drive letter C to the Compact Flash drive. This is obviously not good, and has caused minor problems over the past year. Nothing major enough, though, to motivate me to fix it.
So I got to thinking. I would bet money that my printer, when turned on, first looks for a C drive, and if it doesn’t find one, then it looks further until it finds my main drive (lettered I, which is kind of funny, dontcha think? My computer is no longer part of The Collective. Aieee!). Anyway, I had my camera out yesterday, and took a few photos. I forgot the card in the card reader, and so now I finally know what has been plaguing my printer.
I took the card out of the drive, rebooted, et voila, my printer is now visible.
Teh Enb.
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1. Which I still think it was doing, onna counta Windows could not see my scanner unless I turned it on before turning on my computer. If Windows was able to see the scanner before ZoneAlarm was up and running, then all was well. Otherwise, any new traffic through my USB ports was blocked. I did some searching on ZA’s boards, and others with HP scanners had the same problem.
red paper boat 