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General discussion

HP c4280 Printer, Scanner Not Recognized??

Feb 1, 2011 10:53AM PST

I'm trying to help my parents with their HP c4280 printer, the scanner does not work on their MacBook Pro.

Computer: MacBook Pro 3.1 - MAC OS X 10.5.8
Printer: Hewlett Packard c4280 All-In-One Printer

Basically they've never been able to use the "scanning" capability on this printer. Printing itself works just fine. I go into the printer menu, by way of settings then click on the Printer Icon. Then I open it up and it shows the printing menu, listed on that is SCAN, I click and open the SCAN portion of the menu. I click the SCAN button and comes back saying something to the effect of "device not recognized, or not known". I can't remember exactly, but that's close and I currently can't use their computer.

So basically the computer is saying it doesn't know the scanner is there I think. I've clicked the UPDATES section of the printer, but it says software is up to date. So I'm lost, I just don't know what the problem is, but I really would appreciate some help on the matter, so I can get their scanner to work. Thanks in advance for any help.

Discussion is locked

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Hp C4280
Feb 2, 2011 12:20AM PST

Did you load the MAC software? Usually HP (and others) furnish two load disks, one for Windows and one for Mac. If you don't have the disk, go to Hewlett Packard support and drivers and see if there isn't a downloadable drivers for Mac, there should be.

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Thanks
Feb 2, 2011 6:20AM PST

Yeah, I'll check and see if they have both discs still, hopefully that will fix it. But if it was missing drivers, wouldn't the updates to the printer fix that? I hope I can fix it, thanks for the advice.

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Mac drivers
Feb 3, 2011 12:38AM PST

If you don't have the disk for Mac, go to Hewlett Packard support and drivers, cite the model, C4280, do the download, save to DOWNLOADS and run it from there. The reason for saving to downloads would be to give you the option of burning a hard copy (CD) from that location, should you wish, which is not a bad idea I generally do that as a failsafe for future use.