How To Fix Printer Not Printing Black Ink

We all know how frustrating it is to print something from your computer but your printer won’t cooperate.

Most printer owners have experienced this problem, printer not printing black ink, before. And some even experienced this issue as soon as they put new inks in their printer that makes it more frustrating.

Today, we’re going to tell you how to fix your printer that is not printing black ink continue reading below

How To Fix Printer Not Printing Black Ink

Check your ink levels

The first step in fixing your printer not printing in black problem is to check your ink levels. You can do this step in two different ways.

Go in front of your printer screen and click on the icon that looks like a teardrop. Most printers available today have this icon on top or at the bottom of their printer display screen.

Another way is by opening your printer software on your desktop screen, it usually has your printer icon and name. Once that program’s open, select the option that says “Check ink levels“.

The ink levels that you’re going to see here might not be that accurate to the actual ink levels inside your ink cartridges, but it still provides you with a good estimate of how much ink you have.

If it’s more than a quarter full, then you should be fine.

If it’s less than a quarter full, then you should change your ink cartridge to see if it can help fix your printer issue.

Change your ink cartridges

Once you’ve identified the amount of ink on each of your cartridges, it’s now time to change those with low ink levels.

For those who haven’t change their printer inks before, follow these instructions.

Open your cartridge access door. Printers have different types of cartridge access doors. Have your printer manual ready so you’ll know where it is located. Some printers have it in front of the printer so you just have to pull the door to open it or lift the handle up.

You may also check your printer manual online on your printer’s manufacturer’s website if you don’t have it with you.

Once your ink cartridge access door is open, the ink cartridges should now go to the center of your printer automatically. The part of your printer that encloses your cartridges is called the printhead.

If the printhead doesn’t move to the center of your printer, then you have to close the door and do a hard reset first. To know more about hard resetting your printer, see the FAQ section at the end of this guide.

If you’re able to see all your printer inks inside your printer and you can easily reach them, then you may now remove the one with low ink levels.

It’s either you push the cartridge in first for you to pull it out or you have to gently pull the cartridge upwards.

Once removed, push the new ink cartridge inside the printer. The part that has bronze-colored contacts should go in first and should be facing downward. Your ink cartridge should snap into its place after putting it in your printhead.

Clean your printhead

You can easily clean your printer’s printhead by using the options on your printer screen. First, select the gear icon or your Settings icon.

Gear icon or Settings icon

It will then give you a list of options, you have to locate the words “Tools” or “Printer Maintenance“, then click whichever you see first.

It will now show you another set of options, you have to select “Clean Printhead“.

Cleaning your printhead allows your printer to remove debris and flush old inks out of your ink cartridges. This process will print out a page. You should inspect if the page printed has the right colors and the quality is okay.

If not, perform another set of printhead cleaning. You can do this up to 5 times or until you’re satisfied with the printout.

If you’ve already exhausted all five tries and the printout is still not showing any black ink, then proceed to do advanced troubleshooting steps.

Removing and Reinstalling Printer Driver

Since we did all we can fixing the printer hardware during the basic troubleshooting steps, we’ll now solve the problem from a different angle.

We’re going to look into your printer software. We’ll continue to fix your printer issue by going in front of your computer or laptop screen and doing all the troubleshooting steps there.

The first step we need to do is open your “Devices and Printers” window.

You can do this by clicking the Windows key on your keyboard and the letter “R” simultaneously. You can also click the windows icon on your taskbar and type in the word “Run“.

Once the Run application window is open, type in “control printers” then click the “OK” button.

It will open your “Devices and Printers” window. Look for your printer icon and name. Right-click it and select the option “Printer Preferences“.

This will show your printer settings and printer maintenance tab. You need to check if your printer driver is not corrupted, it should show you the options to print in black only or color.

If you don’t see that option, then your driver might be corrupted.

Exit the window, and right-click your printer icon again on the Devices and Printers window. Choose the option “Remove device“.

Go to your Control Panel home page by clicking the words control panel near the top of the window. Look for “Uninstall a program” under Programs and Features. Once there, find your printer driver’s name and uninstall it from your computer.

Reinstall Driver

Here is our team’s way to make sure you have a clean slate before you reinstall your printer driver and no further file corruption will occur. This is what we refer to as doing a clean uninstall of your printer driver.

The first step for a clean uninstall is you have to stop your print spooler first. You can do these in two ways.

1. Search for your command prompt using Windows’ search. Once you see the Command Prompt app, right-click it with your mouse and choose “Run as administrator“. This will give you access to make changes to your computer. It should open a new window, you just have to type in “net stop spooler” to stop your print spooler.
2. Open your task manager, go to the services tab, and locate your print spooler. Right-click the print spooler name and select “stop” on the options that will show.

Go to your spool folder. You can do this by opening the Run application again and typing in the word “spool” on the text box. Click on the OK button, and it should open a new window afterward.

You’ll see a handful of folders there. First, you have to remove all temp files or temporary files stored by your printer on your computer.

Go to the “PRINTERS” folder and delete all the files there.

Next, go back to your spool folder and go to the “drivers” folder and choose the x64 folder. It will show another set of folders afterward, right-click the “3” folder and rename it to “3.old“.

After doing all those, go back to your task manager window and start your print spooler.

Just like stopping the print spooler, you have two ways to start the spooler again.

1. Search for your command prompt using Windows’ search. Once you see the Command Prompt app, right-click it with your mouse and choose “Run as administrator“. This will give you access to make changes to your computer. It should open a new window, you just have to type in “net start spooler” to stop your print spooler.
2. Open your task manager, go to the services tab, and locate your print spooler. Right-click the print spooler name and select “start” on the options that will show.

After you start the spooler, restart your computer and printer afterward.

Once ready, reinstall your printer driver by installing the newest version available on your printer manufacturer’s website.

After your printer driver setup installation, try printing a document and see if it will print in black.

If all the steps did not work, then feel free to contact us and we’ll look into your printer issue.