HP LaserJet showing up as CD drive

Question

So I am hooking up an HP LaserJet P1102w to a local computer via USB. I have not installed driver/software yet, but interestingly, the printer shows up as a cd\dvd drive.

Granted, a DL of the drivers should fix the problem. My question is:

How / why does Windows manage to think this is a CD/DVD device? Usualy I would get an "unknown device" until drivers are installed.

Solution

This is becoming a relatively common means of manufacturers to distribute drivers for USB devices. There's nothing wrong with your printer.

It was common to include CDs with drivers for peripherals but optical drives are falling out of common use with people instead using the internet, direct device to device transfer (by Bluetooth, USB cable, and so on), and USB flash storage. Rather than put a USB flash drive in the box with the printer, which could be easily misplaced, they put the flash storage in the USB device itself. It appears as a CD drive as that's a device that is both read only (preventing accidental deletion or someone writing over it with something malicious) and the kind of device that the OS will have drivers to access.

Windows thinks it is a CD drive because that's what the manufacturer wants to happen. Once the printer drivers are installed the driver can tell the printer to not make the virtual CD drive appear.

Oh, and another reason that they might choose to emulate a CD drive is because there's likely a real CD that they stamp out for pre-production testing and people that have problems with the printer not making the virtual disk appear as it should. By making it appear as a CD they can test it on a real CD then copy it to the flash memory in the printer and not have to worry about the additional variables of the flash being a different device type with a different file system.

Comments

[fixer1234]

Maybe Windows thinks of it as "write-only" memory. :-)

[Carl B]

Interesting, but how does calling a printer a cd\dvd drive auto install? It did not auto install by the way....

[Justin Goldberg]

It present itself as a virtual CD ROM to install the drivers. I don't know why it was programmed that way.