HP Designjet Z2100

[William Seaward]

I recently acquired a HP Designjet Z2100 and when I first turned it on, the printer would not finish its initialization process stopping at 54%. In the end, it turned out to be the formatter board and more precisely, the hard drive itself. Luckily, I found one on eBay at a reasonable price but what if this happens with the new hard drive? These drives are starting to age and its just a matter of time before this hard drive goes out. Is there a way that I can clone this hard drive so I can put the software on a brand new hard drive, at least this would give me peace of mind.

 

[William Seaward]

I found an HP tech that offered to clone a few hard drives for me. I sent him 2 IDE and 1 SATA drive to format and place the firmware on it. So now I have a few backups available. I wish I had the ability to do this for myself...

 

[PeterBJ]

I guess HP uses a proprietary HD format not compatible with a PC?

 

[William Seaward]

I guess HP uses a proprietary HD format not compatible with a PC?

I know that its HP Unix... but that is all I know.

 

[William Seaward]

I got the hard drives back today and I was excited to check them out. The excitement quickly turned to disappointment as all the hard drives that I had cloned failed... miserably with the 08:11 error.

On a good note though, I had the one good hard drive and it booted up my first Z2100 just fine. I had trouble printing as every time I tried to print it would give a 79:04 error. This is a firmware error and I had version 4.0.0.0 and the HP website had 12.0.0.1 but you needed version 7.0.0.3-5 installed first... I had one heck of a time finding this intermediate firmware! However, I did find it and now the printer is working great, with a perfect nozzle check, and prints from Windows 10 Pro.