no printers show up despite reinstalling drivers

Disconnect all peripherals from your computer.

Boot from your install disc & run Repair Disk from the utility menu. To use the Install Mac OS X disc, insert the disc, and restart your computer while holding down the C key as it starts up.

Select your language.

Once on the desktop, select Utility in the menu bar.

Select Disk Utility.

Select the disk or volume in the list of disks and volumes, and then click First Aid.

Click Repair Disk.

Restart your computer when done.

Repair permissions after you reach the desktop-http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2963 and restart your computer. If still having issues, try the suggestions mentioned in article Snow Leopard & Lion Printer solutions and suggestions. And install the Gutenprint and Gimp-Print for Mac OS X (10.2 and later) drivers if all else fails. Make sure you repair permissions and restart your computer after you install.

Well, I've got OSX 10.8.2 on my MacBook Pro and have followed ALL of the previous instructions by CMCSK....repairing permissions via Disk Utility and even tried installing Gutenprint....but I stil have an empty printer list. I have downloaded and installed the requisite printer drivers for my Brother printer, but the printer list ist still empty.

Curioiusly,if I try putting in the IP address of the printer, click on "Use" --> "Select Printer Software", then I get a complete list of printers, including my Brother printer and "Apollo P-2100 - CUPS+Gutenprint v5.2.9". Alas, if this only worked.

Did you do what I mentioned in the first, second & third paragraph? You make no mention of doing so.

Well, I followed your instructions as closely as I could.

First off, these is no install disk for OS X 10.8.2 so there is no retrieving of the Disk Utility from it. However, in the Utilities Folder there is a program called Disk Utility. Hopefully this is the same as on the "missing disk".

So I then selected "Macintosh HD" clicked on "First Aid" and clicked on "Repair Disk Permissions". This ran for a while and found quite a lot to correct including printer permission set to "0" which the Disk Utility reset to "80" (I hope I'm remembering this correctly--but could be wrong). Running it a second time and it came up clean with no corrections.

And just to make sure everything was kosher, I also ran "Verify Disk Permissions" and finaly "Verify DIsk" - both of which came up clean with no errors. Now your instructions state to run "Repair Disk" however this option is grayed out perhaps since I have a SSD.

Next I restarted, and went looking for the printer list, but it is still completely empty. So it is still gloom and doom here with my silent printer.

Of course after this I installed the Gutenberg Driver which was no help, nor did reinstalling the lastest printer drivers from Brother.

If I missed something in your instructions, please point it out, as I tried to be very careful.

There seems to be some confusion here. My instructions was based on your original post which stated...

I'm running mac os x 10.6.8 on Macbook

Oh, dear. There is some confusion here as we have TWO DIFFERENT PEOPLE in this thread. I don't have Snow Leopard. I have OSX 10.8.2 Mountain Lion as I stated. And I guess I am on the wrong forum and will if I can find the right forum. Sorry for the confusion.

I need a drink. 😝

Back to the drawing board.....

fleubis wrote:

Next I restarted, and went looking for the printer list, but it is still completely empty. So it is still gloom and doom here with my silent printer.

This may be pretty obvious and already tried, but from your Printer List (System Preferences), did you click the little "+" button in order to add the printers to the printer list. I use 10.5, 10.6 and 10.7 on various computers but not 10.8, and for those OS's at least, one needs to explicitly add the printers into that list so that they appear as choices when you print ... Unless you click the "+" button and add printers in, the list does stay empty.

(Reply here to Paul W0ng, duplicate of reply to other user ...)

... from your Printer List (System Preferences), did you click the little "+" button in order to add the printers to the printer list.One needs to explicitly add the printers into that list so that they appear as choices when you print ... Unless you click the "+" button and add printers in, the list does stay empty.

This worked for me in Mavericks. Thank you, CMCSK. I had the same problem in 10.8 but never had gotten around to fixing it.

Though instead of putting in the system restore disk you:

1. boot from the Apple Internet Recovery tool. CMD+R while you boot.
2. Run Disk Utility
3. Repair permissions on your system disk
4. Reboot using system disk

voila! thanks for the direction. I had run "repair permissions" in the disk utility while booted on the system disk and that was not enough.