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Windows 7 Group Policy Preferences - Adding Printers

I'm trying to setup my Group Policy for a soon to be Windows 7 roll out. Everything has pretty much worked great so far, but printers. I currently have a 2003 Print Server and a 2008 Test Printer Server. In my Group Policy Preference. I'm testing 1 printer on both machines that I add as a printer Share. In my Event Viewer it says it failed because the "Printer Driver is Unknown", but I can manually add the printer on my Windows 7 machine. So I know the print driver is compatible, I can also send a test print job.

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Jason Watkins

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bobbailey22

Is it x64 driver or x86? Is windows 7 x64 or x86? Those are usually the hang ups for me when sharing printers from servers. Also, try sharing it from a separate computer and see if you can use it from a windows 7 machine?

Brew_City

ASKER

Firebar:

I could prestage the printer drivers, but I would like to get this working properly

Bobbailey22:
My Printer Server and Windows are both x86 and I can manually add the printer by going through the "Add Printer" Wizard and it works fine. So I don't think its a driver issue, at least a compatibility issue with Windows 7.

Jason Watkins

Drivers for shared printers have to be made available from the the print server, and not the client. Weird, but if the driver is not available from the machine hosting the share, it may not install correctly.

Brew_City

ASKER

Yeah this is a little puzzling to me. This is also the same print server we've been using for all of our XP machines, but we also didn't add them via GPP. I looked at the even log again and here is what it says;

" The user 'Printer Share Name' preference item in the 'Printers {D9CDE78C-E67D-4097-94DB-38C69038C642}' Group Policy object did not apply because it failed with error code '0x80070705 The printer driver is unknown.' This error was suppressed.

Brew_City

ASKER

I ended up following these instructions and its been working for me.

http://blogs.technet.com/askperf/archive/2008/09/19/installing-windows-vista-print-drivers-on-windows-server-2003.aspx

Thanks for all of the ideas!!

Jason Watkins

Glad to hear it has worked out!

Brew_City

ASKER

It definitely would have worked, but ultimately it wasn't what I was trying to accomplish and I found my answer.