The last time I re-installed Windows I had a five-star migraine headache trying to get my printer to install. Unfortunately, I didn’t write down the little trick that I used to make it work. This time I’m putting it in the blog so I can search and find it, and so that other users of Canon F20’s will know what to do when faced with this decidely ugly situation.
The situation is simple. There is an XP driver, and an XP SP2 patch. The XP driver won’t install under SP2, and until you install the driver you can’t install the patch. Clever Canon. Really clever.
So here’s the trick.
- Grab a stiff drink.
- Download all the F20 crap from the Canon site.
- Run both .EXE’s which will decompress two individual folders to the desktop.
- Hit the Control Panel and tell it you want to add new hardware. It will bitch and complain. Ignore it. Point it to the desktop and tell it to look in the USBdrv folder. (It should no longer hang at the hardware detection phase now…)
- NOW go back and install the XP driver per the Canon instructions (which will also install all the other all-in-one stuff and the Canon toolbar).
- And then install the SP2 patch.
Grrrr.