Migrated Network Printers Showing in Registry but Not on Machine ... ?!?!

[rlaplant]

My offline user state is rocking great, files, mapped drives, its all coming over. Network printers however .... They show up .... like they want to be there. But, they dont. For reference, Windows 7 to Windows 7

 

[rlaplant]

OK,

Some headway

 

My printers appear to be having some sort of driver conundrum .... Setting the permission of the driverstore folder didnt help that error. Is USMT bring over drivers as well?

 

[Peter van der Woude]

I would guess not, because in general a new OS would need newer drivers.

[Peter van der Woude]

It's a bit old, but AFAIK it still works the same, here is a nice post about printer migration: http://blogs.technet.com/b/askds/archive/2011/05/24/understanding-usmt-printer-migration-or-the-lack-thereof.aspx

[rlaplant]

Weird .... So I read that there and was like ... that isn't going to work for us.

And I started testing intensively

 

 

<pattern type="Registry">HKCU\Printers\Connections\* [*]</pattern> is the part I worked on.

 

If I take those keys, and use USMT, to restore them. Then printers error.

However, if I backup those keys, and then restore them manually using regimport after the fact, no errors and the printers migrate.

[Peter van der Woude]

I've never had a lot of success with printer migrations via USMT. If the printer already succesfully migrates, you still depend on a (network) location that contains the drivers.

 

Usually GPOs are quicker, or a manual to explain a user how to add a printer.

[rlaplant]

I've never had a lot of success with printer migrations via USMT. If the printer already succesfully migrates, you still depend on a (network) location that contains the drivers.

 

Usually GPOs are quicker, or a manual to explain a user how to add a printer

 

In our environment .... there's no such thing as explaining to the user. So the keys, come over, and then I get driver errors because it tries to install all those printers at once. Adding the connection key's one at a time works great. But without the USMT mapping the HKCU keys don't know who to go to. Is there any way I can change where they "restore" to? I have a great programmer here, and if we could restore them to a junk key, he can read them and add them slowly (30 second pause)

[rlaplant]

In our environment .... there's no such thing as explaining to the user. So the keys, come over, and then I get driver errors because it tries to install all those printers at once. Adding the connection key's one at a time works great. But without the USMT mapping the HKCU keys don't know who to go to. Is there any way I can change where they "restore" to? I have a great programmer here, and if we could restore them to a junk key, he can read them and add them slowly (30 second pause)

 

NVM ..I think i found it.

[Peter van der Woude]

Feel free to share your solution

[rlaplant]

Feel free to share your solution

Well .... once I can finally get the key to write somewhere that it can be read. I have a great programmer here that has a script ready for me to read the key via runonce, and add the printers slowly, probably one every 45 seconds. All at once crashes the driver installs. When I have it, Ill post it all.