HP Envy 6420e does not scan with WIndows 7

[larcy]

It isn't in english, so both phone and chat are not viable options

[larcy]

It is not in english, so phone and chat are not viable options. This forum is the only support option I've found that it is possible to communicate with

[Kumar0307]

@larcy

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[larcy]

So after a lot of trial and error I got this to work, so I thought I‘d post here to help others. It isn’t ideal so if other people have other suggestions then great

First thing is remember this was Windows 7 Ultimate 64 Bit on an HP laptop.  The issue was whilst printing worked fine, scanning did not work at all. For fuller details look at the first post.

There appeared to be two problems both which needed solving before scanning would work, one hardware related and one software related, so dealing with them one at a time

• Cable. I had four cables,  a HP brand 3m cable, a HP brand 1.8m cable, a generic 3m cable, and a generic 1.8m cable. All are in perfect condition. All four cables worked perfectly with a HP Officejet 6210 for both printing and scanning and all worked perfectly on a old HP laserjet. All worked perfectly for printing with the HP Envy 6420e. But the only cable out the four that would work for scanning on the HP Envy 6420e was the HP Branded 1.8m cable. Trying to use any of the other three cables during software installation the installation process needs to communicate with the scanner, and that appears to hang or fail so is not installing the driver. Using HP scan and print doctor it will fail on ”driver check” and if you do manage to install the software and then try and use the scanner it will time out after a long time (like 30 minutes) saying “could not communicate with scanner”. All the cables had different resistances (the HP 1.8m one that worked actually had a higher resistance than ones that did not work), but of course resistance in a cable for data transfer is very different to DC resistance. So it appears the HP Envy 6420e is very sensitive to some kind of signal loss, far more sensitive for example than an HP Officejet 6210. This would be consistent with the long timeouts, i.e. the software keeps re-trying after some kind of data loss error before finally giving up. It isn’t signal strength either, all the cables behave exactly the same with or without a powered USB hub. So moral of the story, choose your cable carefully and don’t assume just because a cable works fine on printing on the Envy 6420e or with other HP devices it will work for scanning with the Envy 6420e
• Software. Do not install the HP full feature software, for me it would not work for scanning for windows 7. Instead follow the following steps.
  1. fully uninstall any HP envy 6420e software you may have installed (and there will be several bits of this,
  2. disconnect the USB cable,
  3. reboot,
  4. in control panel>system>advanced system settings>hardware>device installation settings set it to “install driver software from windows update if it is not found on my computer” if it isn’t set like that already
  5. plug in the USB cable between your Envy 6420e and your PC/laptop. It should start installing drivers for you. Let it finish.
  6. Goto Devices and printers and find the HP envy device, right click on it and choose properties and then hardware. In my case I ended up with 4 devices, HP ENVY 6400 series USB, and PCL3, and REST, and REST_WinUSB. Click on the the REST ones, choose properties and uninstall the drivers
  7. Straight away go to whatever program it is you want to use for scanning, you will now see a WIA driver, and scanning should work. If you like try it before you remove the REST drivers and in my case scanning would not work
  8. Note that next time you plug in the printer, or reboot, the toe REST drivers will get installed again (unless you set the system otherwise as in point D above. This doesn’t’ appear to be a problem, as long as the first time you try to use whatever scanning software it is you want to use is when the two REST drivers are not installed it seems ok

Now obviously I have a particular hardware/software setup and this might not work for you or you may find it behaves very differently. But hopefully there will be enough above to help anyone who might encounter the same problem. You may not have several days free time though, that’s how long it took to work through all the permutations above.