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‎08-31-2016 05:40 PM - edited ‎08-31-2016 05:42 PM

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Product: HP color laserjet MFP M476dw
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan

The printer unexpected prints out indefinite pages with an error message. It seems to be random. The job does not show on the print cue and if I cancel it on the printer it restarts. The only way to stop it is turn the printer off or pull out the paper tray. 

 

The printer is in a home office and links over wifi to 2 windows laptops and my iMac. There are a number of iphones and ipads in the vicinity if that helps?

 

It is extremely annoying. I cannot print my own documents and it is wasting all my paper. Any help would be terriffic. Thank you.undefined

4 REPLIES 4

‎09-01-2016 04:32 AM - edited ‎09-09-2016 05:06 AM

HP Recommended

>> ...  prints out indefinite pages with an error message ...

 

Your image does not show any error message, just random characters.

 

Pages and pages of such random characters are indicative of the printer receiving a corrupt print job, which the relevant Page Description Language interpreter cannot successfully decode.

 

Thsi may be because something on your network is sending a rogue job which is indeed malformed, or it could be a genuine job which is being corrupted between the sending system and the printer (e.g. bad cables, ports, switches, wireless, etc.).

 

... and if you 'cancel' the job at the printer, the sending system may then not get confirmation that the printer has received all of the job, and it will try to send it again.

‎09-08-2016 07:20 PM

HP Recommended

Thanks for your response.

 

Any ideas for identifying where this rougue print job may be originating from? Nothing shows on the print queue on my imac.

 

‎09-09-2016 05:12 AM

HP Recommended

>> ... Any ideas for identifying where this rougue print job may be originating from ...

 

As the printer is on a small (home) network, the initial course of action would be to power-off all devices, then power-on the printer, and (after it has initialised), turn on the other devices, one by one, until the unexpected pages start to print out.

 

Some difficulties with this approach are:

 

  • If the problem is caused by intermittent corruption, then the fault may not occur during the tests!
  • If the 'rogue' device is sending via wireless, it may perhaps not be one of your devices?

‎09-12-2016 05:27 AM

HP Recommended

Thanks, I'll give that a shot. 

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