Printer freezes blank screen

[cannon_river47]

Without any known cause, our LaserJet M506 suddenly will not complete booting up. The machine will start and the control screen will turn blue, but will not continue to any of the boot progress indication stages (fan runs and power lights etc. go on). Have tried restarting but no go. Purchased in Dec. of 2016. Have been running with USB  and Mac OSX El Capitan and Yosemite. Any suggestions are appreciated. Thank you.

[Alex-TATS]

Hi cannon_river47,

This is a formatter or firmware issue. Check at the rear of the printer what colour is led. If it is green, please follow the instructions I have just sent you via a private message. If it is orange, then you will need either a new eMMC or a new formatter board.

I hope this will help,

Cheers!

[cannon_river47]

Thanks for your response, Alex. The LED is orange/red, which sounds like bad news to me! What do I do next-- take it somewhere to be repaired? Are these expensive repairs?

Also, do you have any idea what may have caused this? We have had some lightning in the area lately, but nothing heavy, and no strikes we know of. We have had it plugged into a surge protector.

[Alex-TATS]

It is recommended from HP that the printers should be pluged directly to wall sockets instead of surge protectors.

Try that and also try the pm I send you. If that fails then you will have to get the printer serviced by a technician (preferably by a HP qualified one).

Cheers

[cannon_river47]

Thanks. I did contact a qualified technician. It appears that the cost of the eMMC and then possibly a new formatter would be nearly the cost of a new machine. 😞  I'm pretty disappointed. We are a very very small home business, so the number of pages we've printed with this machine in the past 1.5 years are a very small portion of the expected output. Not sure if we will buy HP again or not. But I do appreciate your suggestions.

[cannon_river47 · Accepted solution]

Hey! Success! Just on a last chance try, I took out the eMMC and put it back in again (I had done this before). For some reason, it worked this time and the printer booted up. Must be my lucky day!  The videos on line under Customer Self-Help helped me to identify what the eMMC is.