Moving documents from one print queue to another

Factual Questions
1

I have two documents in a printer’s queue. They won’t print because the printer is out of toner. There is another attached printer (the default) that prints fine. Is there any way to transfer queued docs from one to the other? Both printers are accessed via the LAN, and the OS is Win XP. The two printers are a Brother MFC-465CN (out of toner) and an HP LaserJet 6MP.
Any luck or are the print jobs stuck in the printer’s spool?

Oh, I’ll also take anything dumped to the screen — the queued jobs are transmission confirmations, and without them I have no idea whether a Very Important Fax went thought (and can’t contact the client). This is a Need Help Fast situation, but I thought that would have been obnoxious to put in the thread title. Plus it didn’t lend itself to a funny quip.

Thanks,

Rhythm

2

This is a crap shoot. Its probably just easier to buy some toner. But here goes:

You might be able to intercept the transmission. Take the printer offline. Put a linux box or windows box running cygwin. Give it the printer’s IP address. Run this:

netcat -p9100 > output.pcl

That should create a TCP listener on port 9100. Tell the print queue to try again. It should send the contents of the print job to that computer in either PCL or PS format. Im guessing pcl because its windows. The file output.pcl should contain the transmission. There are utilities to turn PCL and PS files to PDF out there.

3

You could disconnect the Brother printer from the network and assign the same IP address to the HP printer.

4

Actually, this might be easier:

C:\windows\system32\spool\printers

You should see spl and shd files. Those are your spool. You might be able to move those to another machine.

5

Just to be sure: these are two jobs that are stuck in the print queue on the server, right? And it’s a Windows server, right?

If so, you should be able to pause the print queue, repoint it at the working printer, then restart the queue.

To do this you’ll need Print Operator, Server Operator, or Administrator rights on the server.

6

Thanks …

The ink cartridges won’t arrive until tomorrow, so I’m still hoping to drag these things to a working printer. In the \printers directory I see a few SHD and SPL files that match the desired docs in time (and almost size, especially considering that the print queue is probably counting space differently). Any idea how to move them to a different queue? I tried Google, but haven’t found the right search terms (did find this thread though, which was a wee bit creepy for some reason).

Since the files are there, that suggests I can safely try the Linux route.