William Martin

Q: Reverting to an Earlier Printer Driver Through Time Machine

I'm running an old HP printer with the generic El Capitan driver which was recently updated and caused issues with my scanning function.  I'd like to go back to the older driver that is more compatible with my printer, mainly because without the scanning function I can't align the printer.  How do I do this using Time Machine?  I'm not sure where the drivers are in the system files. 

Mac mini, OS X El Capitan (10.11.2)

Posted on Sep 22, 2016 5:52 PM

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Q: Reverting to an Earlier Printer Driver Through Time Machine

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  • by leroydouglas,

    leroydouglas leroydouglas Sep 22, 2016 5:57 PM in response to William Martin
    Level 7 (23,789 points)
    Notebooks
    Sep 22, 2016 5:57 PM in response to William Martin

    Finder>Go>Go to Folder

     

    copy and paste:

    /Library/Printers

     

    look in the PPD folder

  • by John Lockwood,

    John Lockwood John Lockwood Sep 23, 2016 8:13 AM in response to William Martin
    Level 6 (9,349 points)
    Servers Enterprise
    Sep 23, 2016 8:13 AM in response to William Martin

    With some of the multi-function printers some of the printer software can be scattered in several locations. As long as you are still on the same operating system version consider the following approach.

     

    1. Make sure you have the previous driver installer package (see below), do not bother trying to install it at this point as it will almost certainly refuse saying a newer version is installed
    2. Go to /private/var/db/receipts
    3. Look for something like com.apple.pkg.HP_* (there are quite a lot of them)
    4. You will probably need to delete them all, this will then trick the Installer program into no longer thinking the newer version is installed
    5. Now run the older installer

     

    As far as I am aware the current version is HP Printer Drivers v5.0 for OS X

    As far as I am aware the previous version was HP Printer Drivers v3.1 for OS X

     

    It is arguably long past time that Apple implemented a proper 'uninstall' function. We are years past the point that Mac software was a simple drag & drop install process. Yes apps from the Mac App Store can be both easily installed and removed but everything else like in this case printer drivers is often far more complex.