Over the weekend, we got a new desktop in the house and as per usual, I blew away the bloated pre-installed image in favor for a clean install of Windows 10 Pro. Post install, I found 4 drivers that defaulted to the built-in Windows versions; clicking “Update driver” immediately reached out to Windows Update and I had a completed and successful install. Some time after that, Jolene mentioned that “Scan to network folder” from our HP printer wasn’t working and if I could take a look at it.
Six hours later I was ready to smash the desktop and the printer in short order. I considered peeing on the monitor for good measure. This note is to prevent the same problem from happening in the future.
As it turns out, on clean installs of the 1709 build of Windows 10, a particular component of Windows is no longer installed with the rest of the OS. A component that shipped in Windows for a long, long time and continues to be left in place on computers that are upgraded to 1709. A component that will prevent most printers from successfully talking to any PC in the house. Because of this change I found that while the new box had issues, the reset of the PC’s in the house didn’t have this issue and could scan over the network successfully.
*sigh*
The change was seemingly made for security purposes. I can’t object to that, but at no point did anything in the printer/scanner configuration – pages or app – tell me what the problem was. Whenever I tried to scan to the network share, I got error messages like “An error occurred communicating with the scanning device” or “An error occurred while communicating with the HP imaging device” which was great because these message appeared on pages that were hosted by the printer/scanner! Odd in that I had to connect to the device successfully to get the error messages telling me I couldn’t connect.
I rebooted all the things. I reset the printer to factory settings four times. Re-installed Windows twice. Searched Bing and Google and HP support sites. Saw a bunch of posts on HP’s site that strongly state the most recent firmware – released this October – broke “Scan to network folder” for everyone (which is again odd, since I had three machines that continued to support the feature.) And then, after randomly clicking links and searches, I saw a tiny blurb on a related post somewhere that called out that SMB v1 was disabled on clean installs of Windows 10, starting with September’s build. And that printers would have to take a firmware update to re-enable some functionality for machines in this state.
*SIGH*
TL;DR version, if you are having issues where your printer/scanner does not talk to your PC after a clean install of Windows 10 (1709 or newer) you can re-enable SMBv1 support temporarily, until your printer gets a firmware update to support SMB v2 or v3:
- Open Settings on your PC (Win+I)
- Search for “Turn Windows feature on or off”
- Find “SMB 1.0/CIFS File Sharing Support” in the tree
- Make sure everything underneath the parent node is selected – for me Server wasn’t
- Reboot
At this point, scanning to the network share should be working again. If it’s not, give the printer a reboot; if it still doesn’t work, my apologizes for the lengthy post that didn’t work for you.
Mostly, I’m taking this note down to remind myself that this needs fixing on new installs.
“Six hours later I was ready to smash the desktop and the printer in short order. I considered peeing on the monitor for good measure.”
Hilarious read.
Just ran into this problem and you helped get me on my way. Thanks man. Friggin’ Ricoh 2501 had me questioning my IT abilities, would not scan to a Windows 10 Pro machine’s folder…it was really just Windows 10 being an over-protective assmunch. Build 1709, worst one yet!
One day I’ll switch to Linux. I swear.
Glad it helped but in all honesty, I still like 1709 for the other new things is brings. In fact, I still think that the blame of this one is with the software teams in the printer companies. Sucks that they are using an API that has long been deprecated.
Thank you, Thank you. Thank you. for both your solution and humor. I spent a couple of hours trying to figure out why a SAVIN 9040 would not scan to a new laptop, but would scan to others. Error messages such as “Check settings” didn’t help. Your solution worked perfectly.
Thanks again.
I also enjoyed your post and appreciate the solution. I had wondered why my network share through a Linksys EA7500 router suddenly stopped functioning. After getting error messages about needing SMBv2 connection to access the share, it was frustrating to find a fix that worked. Re-enabling SMBv1 on my Win 10 laptop restored access to my shared drive. Thanks for sharing your efforts to get to the bottom of the matter. It appears that many vendors need to examine their drivers to develop a better solution that supports Microsoft’s attempt to improve Win 10 security.
Thank you. I could’n scan Konica Minolta SMB. Re-enabling SMBv1 and OK.
Very helpful. One thing – if the SMB v1 server is not used for a period of 15 days (excluding any time the PC is powered down), the SMB v1 service uninstalls itself! This is a one-time event, mind, so after you reinstall it, it will remain installed until you consciously uninstall it.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts about wireless.
Regards
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you man. Havve a gdeat day. Bye
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