HP LaserJet Pro 200 color MFP M276nw not installing

Another day another printer issue, this time a HP Laserjet Pro 200 series which wouldn’t install. For the most part I’ve found HP printers to be straightforward to install when used over a network and USB but this Laserjet was anything but.

The first attempt was made using the most recent Windows install package from the HP website but the install process would get to 99% after about 30 minutes and fail. I thought it could be an issue with a component in the full package so tried the basic drivers but the printer still would not install.

I connected to a WiFi network and tried a firmware update which indicated it already had the most recent firmware. When connected to WiFi the printer would install just fine so the issue was just with the USB connection.

The printer has a smart install feature which mounts a drive with install files to make it easy to install. It turns out this feature is what was causing the install to fail. After disabling smart install the printer was detected normally and installed in less than a minute compared to the 30 minutes for the failed attempts.

How to disable HP Smart Install on a HP LaserJet 200 Color MFP

  • On the control panel of your printer touch the Setup button
  • Scroll down to Services and touch this to enter the next menu
  • Touch Services to access that menu
  • Again scroll down until you find HP Smart Install then touch to enter
  • Set HP Smart Install to OFF.

ESXi 5.5 error occurred consolidating disks

The setup is two ESXi 5.5 hosts, one is the main host with three live servers and the second is the backup host with three server replicas, Acronic Applicance and vCenter Server. There is a separate physical machine used as the backup target for the scheduled backup tasks. In addition to backing up to the physical target the three virtual servers are replicated to the secondary host each night.

Nightly backups of the three virtual machines using the Acronis appliance were failing and the Acronis appliance was powering off. According to the Acronis log it was running out of space while running the backups. Normally it is just a matter of deleting all the snapshots using vSphere Client but this time one of them just would not delete.

After reloading the vSphere client one of the replica VMs had a warning saying that it’s disks needed to be consolidated. Several attempts resulted in a error saying the disk images were locked. The Acronis appliance was turned off but it turns out that it was locking files relating to the replica VM. I had to boot and then shutdown the Acronis appliance three times before it would release the lock on the files and the consolidation worked perfectly followed by the removal of the snapshot.