Unattended printer installation

[Bongo]

Hi all,

I'm trying to setup an automatic installation of a printer. It must have 0 user interaction. I've tried prndrvr, prnmngr, rundll32 printui.dll, PrintUIEntry, I've tried an msi package....

But they all either don't work or they give me errors. It is an unsigned printer driver, but there must be a way to make it work.

The rundll32 printui.dll, PrintUIEntry give me an error that "Windows cannot locate a suitable printer driver"

I have been playing with this for 4 days and have verified many sites on the web. I'm sure there's an easy way to do this that I have missed.

Any input or suggestion or help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance

[InTheWayBoy]

First off this should probably be in either the Application Installs or Device Drivers forum...

Secondly, what printer model are we talking about here? And any info about the client OS that this will be installing on...I'm assuming WinXP, but is that all?

[Bongo]

Hi InTheWayBoy,

The O/S is windows XP. Basically I have a clean install that I want it to work on. It's just a windows XP SP1 with nothing on it.

The printer is a Star TUP942 with monitoring, a thermal printer. It is connected by USB. The commands don't work but I think that it's mainly because it's not signed.

I guess my question Has anyone ever tried to install unsigned printer drivers unattended and succeeded?

And if yes, then how did you do it?

It's funny because if I use the command

rundll32 printui.dll, PrintUIEntry /ii ...

it does open an add printer windows box and it does point to the driver I tell it to use. But unfortunately it is not unattended, you have to do the steps manually.

If I use the

rundll32 printui.dll, PrintUIEntry /if ...

it says that windows cannot locate a suitable printer driver......but it found it with the ii command. So that's why I think that it has a problem with digital signage.

So has anybody tried unattended installation and faced this problem?

Thanks again

[Bongo]

Never mind.

Found it. Scratch this post. B)

Not that anybody read this.....

[sy89]

it would be nice if you wrote the answer you found rather than leaving it blank, it might become useful one day.

[Bongo]

Hi,

Well I found the answer half way.

I was typing the command wrong, that is why it was giving me the error. A coworker pointed out to me that I type the model name incorrectly. You need to find the model name in the inf file and copy it so that it is perfectly the same. That was the problem I had.

After that the installation worked. But another problem came up, before completing the installation it gave me the "continue anyways or stop installation prompt"

I am contacting the company to have the driver digitally signed. Changing the unsigned warning in the control panel removes that prompt but I don't know how to change that automatically. We can do it manually, but that's out of the question. So it was put on hold for now.

[WhatBackHand]

@Bongo That last piece of information was exactly the piece of information I was missing and so have solved my problem, thank you for updating the post with your experience.

I've now added a note to my batch files saying that the model string must match the inf file. Hadn't spotted that requirement in any other post or guide that I've read here or anywwhere else.

So you see as sy89 says it was worthwhile, at least as far as I'm concerned!