My HP deskjet 3820 has a jammed printer head. It it apparently stuck within the housing, at the far right as you face the printer. There is no paper jam, and no obvious cause. I performed all the typical steps to correct to no avail. Also, I should add, it was working fine this morning as I was the last to print. Then, myseriously, caput…as my wife tried to print later the same day.
Is there any hope?
I have this problem with my own HP printer and it freakin’ drives me nuts. I’m not familiar with that you, but is there a screen asking you to clear the cart jam and then hit enter (or another button)? If so, just hit enter and it may or may not solve the problem (i.e. clears it). I find that this occurs after long periods of inactivity and with some regular printing it happens much less frequently.
I used to grumble as I bent down, opened the lid and tried to pry those damn carts out of the “jam.” Enter works for me and works better than my manual clearing.
Check the help documentation. I recall that the stuff I read on my printer told me to clean this plastic strip that the carriage uses to determine where it is. However, I cleaned it and it didn’t appear to help, but YMMV.
Chairman Pow, when you say “cart”, is that short for ink cartridge? Or, is that perhaps what one might call the “cradle” (i.e.: assembly holding ink as well as serving as the print head)? The online help was useless. I’ll see if i have the book, but I doubt it. 
Also, let me ask…even under normal operating conditions, why is it so bad to try to move the printer head manually, if necessary…not that I did, mind you.
I suppose it is confusing for me to have used two terms to mean the same thing. In theory, you are actually clearing a carriage (“cradle”) jam, but my printer at least displays the error message “cartridge jam”
I’d wager it’s not in the book…Now that I look on HP’s web site, I’d be surprised if that model came with a book. I thought it was a newer version that had a display and everything (and the all important enter key).
Did you read this in the help section? If that didn’t help, use the links to email HP. It’s worth a try but I found that after four or five ridiculously long emails (the boilerplate they put in each one is tremendous), they gave me the answer I wanted.
Or you can just pull it out yourself.
You mean move it to clear the jam where I said it was easier to hit the enter button? No reason, except that when my printer (an ancient Officejet) gets stuck, it gets stuck way at the end of the run and feels like it slips off the track. It’s a pain in the ass to pull it out, but I found “enter” works just as well. As long as you pull it back along the proper path and don’t jerk it around to break something, there’s nothing wrong with it that I can see (and having done that many times myself, let’s just say that I didn’t make anything worse).