SBS 2008 – Konica Minolta BizHub C353 Driver GP Stall

One of our clients called to say that they had a new copier being installed at their site and if we would mind popping by to help out with the install.

It seemed like a pretty straight forward task and we had a bit of time in-between calls so the call came in at an opportune time.

We downloaded what we thought were the newest drivers for the unit:

Now, the 64bit driver installed into the Print Management drivers node with no real issue.

But, when we went to install the 32bit drivers after configuring the printer, adding it to the SBS 2008 Console, and deploying it via Group Policy we received this surprise:

Add Printer Driver Wizard

The selected driver must be installed remotely from an x86 computer using Type 3 (User mode) drivers.

Okay . . . now how exactly does that work again?

Since this was the first time we had seen this message, a bit of searching ensued to figure out how.

That was a tough find:

We needed to navigate to \\MY-SBS\Printers and open the Server Properties, bring up the driver dialogue and “upload” the drivers onto the server from an x86 system as the error message indicated.

But, something still did not jibe.

So, we went back to Konica Minolta’s Web site for the copier to see just what was going on with the drivers.

Now, what is happening right now, this evening, as this post is being written is pretty funky. The driver results page looks different than it did this afternoon while at the client site.

Here is what the driver site looks like now.

Windows Vista 32-Bit Postscript Drivers:

Windows Vista 32-Bit PCL Drivers:

Windows Vista 64-Bit Postscript Drivers:

Windows Vista 64-Bit PCL Drivers:

Now, after looking at all of the drivers, we knew that the Universal Driver was going to be a problem.

We did need a WHQL signed driver though.

The original driver we had downloaded was both the Postscript and PCL 6.1.2.0 driver sets. After extracting them, we found that they contained both x86 and x64 driver directories. It was the 6.1.2.0 x86 driver that was giving us the headache on SBS 2008.

So, on the second venture through the site, we looked at every driver option for the copier and one eventually stood out as the candidate for our solution.

Can you guess which one?!? :)

Yes, it was the 6.3.1.0 driver set dated June 24, 2008 that was our only other specific driver with a WHQL signature. Only, it was not an option for Vista 32bit where we looked for the 32bit drivers in the first place!

We downloaded, extracted, and ran the Add Driver routine in the Print Management console.

Sure enough, the 64bit driver updated to 6.3.1.0 and the 32bit 6.3.1.0 driver installed via the console with no issues either.

Once we had the driver in place, we ran our workstation reboot script and we had all of our Windows Vista x86 machines connected to the new copier.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*All Mac on SBS posts will not be written on a Mac until we replace our now missing iMac! (previous blog post)

Windows Live Writer