DesignJet 430 Bad Drivers from HP website

[tojojon]

Thank you MarcusC! I appreciate your flexibility in this matter. -Tom

[D Hook]

Email sent.  You may have to try some of the different model printers to find a driver that works for you 430.  Maybe 330 or 450C?  IIRC, the 430 is a black and white only, right?

[D Hook]

Email bounced.  Try the link I PM'd you instead.

[tojojon]

Thanks a million, D Hook. Yes, my 430 is black ink only. -Tom

[tojojon]

When I clicked on the private message icon, this is what I got: 

"You do not have sufficient privileges for this resource or its parent to perform this action", now the icon has disappeared so I can't try again. Seems I have the touch of death lately.

D Hook, you have already spent a great deal of your time trying to help me out, so please feel free to pause or withdraw at any time. This is not a time-critical situation at all, and I think that I will eventually stumble upon a solution. I wish I knew if the drivers on HP's site are wrong or incomplete, or maybe I'm just not understanding. Anyway, sorry your email was rejected, I don't know why that should happen, but thank you very much for trying. -Tom

[D Hook · Accepted solution]

I suppose the email was kicked because it contained a file that **bleep** didn't trust.

Don't know what happened to the PM icon for you.

Have you tried doing a search under the "Support" tab for your printer at the top of this page?  I found the support page has the driver for both the 32 and 64 bit XP operating systems.  I downloaded them and the files unzipped just fine and look complete nothing like what you described originally.  I would try that option again and see if maybe you just got a bad download.  Here's a link:https://support.hp.com/us-en/drivers/selfservice/hp-designjet-400-printer-series/25253/model/24559

  When you download the driver, it's in a zipped folder so you have to unzip it to a new folder on your desktop.  Should be around 17 files when it's unzipped.  Then use the "Have Disc" option when loading the driver and browse to that folder. 

The other thing I noticed was that the driver for the 430 might be already on your computer in the XP system.  You may have already tried this but when you go to "Add a printer" and select HP, it should bring up a list of supported printers that are already in your computer.  My Windows 7 system still shows the legacy printers like the 220 and the 450C as an option to load.  You might try other drivers that are in the same family as your printer first.  Then maybe move onto the 600 and 700 series.  If they don't work, use the "remove a device" option and try another.  (You may have to reboot between loading and removing each driver.)  I've had success with this in the past.  I used to use a driver for a Designjet 5500 with several different printers because the interface was much better.  Used it for a T1200, which was much newer than the 5500 and it worked just fine.   

I hope you can get this working.  Those older printers have a lot of life left in them.  Let us know what happens.

[tojojon]

Thanks for the ideas. I tried the link to HP drivers, I had not seen version 4.83 before and I've tried probably 8-10 attempts at downloading from these same HP web pages. Anyway, I tried downloading this version and had the exact same results, after unzipping, I was left with 16 files, 13 of which had the underscore in file extension. The 3 files that had complete file extensions were: a readme file,.inf file, and a .cat file. When I expanded the .ex_ to .exe, then I could run that file, but it started the HP Color Correction Wizard. So that didn't work.

However, your suggestion to  use the drivers that come with xp did work. Although the 430 is not listed, at the very top of the list of HP printers was the HP-GL/2 driver that I totally missed. The Add Printer process finished without any errors and  HP-GL/2 shows up as an available printer. I haven't been able to try it from AutoCad yet due issues with Autodesk, but I am quite sure that you have found the solution. Sorry to waste everyone's time on something I should have known. Thanks so much to everyone that helped with this. D Hook, thank you for all the time you spent, and for the solution. I'm very happy to be moving forward again. Take care everyone, and thanks again. -Tom

[D Hook]

Glad it worked out for you.