HP Laserjet 400 M401dn is not recognized as a printer.

[JohnWe]

We have one of these printers and the user plugged it into their PC before we loaded the drivers.  Now the PC sees the printer as an external storage device.  Even when we try to load the full drivers and we plug the printer into a USB port when the install process says to connect the printer it stills immediately sees it as a storage device and won't finish the install.  We have tried doing the same process with a different USB port but no luck.  We tried going thru the registry and deleting all the references to a M401 printer but that did not help.  What can we do to fix this?  Thanks

[HPMN1127]

Do you have a different USB cable available? Try a new one if possible. Another thing to attempt, would be to reboot the computer (with the printer USB attached), once booted up, in the bottom right of the taskbar, you should see the driver going through the download process (may have to click the arrow to see everything in that corner). double click that and it should open another window showing it's progress. Just watch it and see if there's any specific error as to why it won't finish, but hopefully it works just fine for you after that.

Good luck!

[JohnWe · Accepted solution]

thanks for the reply.....what I ended up doing was in the settings on the printer Control Panel I turned off the Smart Install feature and then after a PC reboot I was able to install the printer drivers and everything now works.