Repair a broken HP LaserJet printer by baking it

Categories Hardware, Mods

After my HP printer died just after his warranty period I searched for a solution what to do to revive it. When reported to HP they wanted to charge €350 to repair the printer, which is around the same amount a new printer would cost, besides that I had to ship to whole bulky printer to them. When searching the internet for an alternative you will find a lot of people with the same problem using this printer series but not a lot of clear solutions.

This write-up will describe a way to repair the HP LaserJet M1522 series printer. While this idea is not new I wanted to create an easy to follow overview to repair this printer instead of a “just bake the formatter board”. I hope this write-up will be handy for some of the people out there with the same problem. While this write-up is focusing on the HP LaserJet M1522 MFP printer I would expect the same approach to work on other faulty hardware.

The problem with the HP LaserJet M1522 printer series seems to be a faulty formatter board. Since this problem exists in a lot of units you would expect HP to take care of this and have their people informed about the problems with this unit. However when contacting HP they will quite likely have no idea what is wrong with the unit, at least that was my experience.

The symptoms of a faulty formatter board are among the following:

  • The printer seems to turn off completely out of itself
  • The printer hangs when booting up
  • The printer needs a couple of resets before it will boot correctly
  • The printer won’t turn on anymore at all

Usually the problems with the formatter board will get worse over time until the moment the printer won’t do anything at all anymore. The display of the printer will probably display the messages “Initializing…” and “Hewlett-Packard >>>>>” while is hanging during the boot cycle:

 

HP LaserJet M1522 MFP Fix 1

 

The problems with the formatter board seem to be caused by bad solder connections, so the way we are going to fix this is by ‘baking’ the formatter board. This write-up will take you through the steps you need to take to fix the printer by baking the formatter board. The only downside to this approach is that this fix only lasted for 6 months for me after which I had to bake the formatter board again.

 

DISCLAIMER: This write-up is just for your information, I am not responsible for what you do with your printer. Keep in mind that this is Fringe-IT and that in doubt you should just buy a new printer and leave projects like this to people who have an idea about what they are doing.

 

Instructions

 

Find the screw located at the right side of the back of the printer as shown in the picture below. This screw is the only one we need to unscrew to be able to take the left side of the printer off, so lets remove it.

 

HP LaserJet M1522 MFP Fix 2

 

After removing the screw we can pop open the side panel, however there is a small latch at the bottom of the printer which you need to press for an easy release. See the picture below for the small latch.

 

HP LaserJet M1522 MFP Fix 3

 

After popping off the side panel we can already see the fomatter board, we see two boards and the bigger one on top is the formatter:

 

HP LaserJet M1522 MFP Fix 4

 

Since we need to work on this formatter we will have to get it disconnected from the rest of the printer. The first thing to do is to disconnect all the ribbons and connectors shown in the picture below.

 

HP LaserJet M1522 MFP Fix 5

 

After disconnecting all connections from above it is time to remove the five screws holding the formatter board in its place:

 

HP LaserJet M1522 MFP Fix 6

 

After removing the 5 screws the formatter board can easily be taken out of the printer. Before we can bake the formatter board we should remove the on-board battery from it. It is quite likely the battery won’t take the heat from the baking so well. The battery is located in the top right corner of the formatter board as can be seen below. Pay attention to its orientation, you probably do not want to connect it back the wrong way around.

 

HP LaserJet M1522 MFP Fix 7

 

When turning the formatter board over you can see the two solder connections of the battery. The easiest way to desolder the battery is by heating the solder and sucking it away with a solder sucker.

 

HP LaserJet M1522 MFP Fix 8

 

After removing the battery the board is almost ready to be put in to the oven.

 

HP LaserJet M1522 MFP Fix 8b

 

Because we don’t want to have the formatter board touching any part of the oven we will create some small stands for it to stand on. The easiest way to do this is to get some tinfoil and create small stands like shown on the picture below.

 

HP LaserJet M1522 MFP Fix 9

 

The tinfoil stands are pushed through the holes of the screws of the formatter board and after this the board is ready to be put inside the oven.

 

HP LaserJet M1522 MFP Fix 10

 

Make sure that the formatter board is not touching any part of the oven, this might cause overheating or melting certain parts of the formatter board.

 

HP LaserJet M1522 MFP Fix 11

 

We should pre-heat the oven on 180 degrees Celsius (about 350 degrees Fahrenheit) 200 degrees Celsius (about 400 degrees Fahrenheit) Update: Julius Rahmandar commented that the temperature should be a bit higher (from 180°C to 200°C) and this indeed seems to work a bit better. After popping the formatter board in the oven it is time to ‘bake’ it for 8 minutes (also on 200 degrees Celsius). Of course instead of baking the board you could probably also pop it in to the microwave for a short moment, but I would advise against that 😉

After these 8 minutes we should let the formatter board cool down for a while, be warned that the formatter board will be quite hot. After the formatter board has cooled down it is time to read this write-up backwards and follow all the steps to put the printer back together. So, remove the tinfoil stands, solder back the battery, screw the formatter board back in to the printer, reconnect all the wires and ribbons and put the casing back.

Turn on your printer and if you are lucky it should be working again!

 

Some of the sources I used and more information:

The official formatter board part number is: CC368-60001

A guide for the HP LaserJet P2015dn: https://www.xltoolbox.net/blog/2013/11/fixing-laserjet-network-connectivity.html

Update 2016: The fix only works for a couple of months before you have to bake the formatter board again. During my last re-bake of the formatter board I encountered a different error, which I thought was linked to the formatter board issue (but was not). The printer would only show “install black cartridge” even though it was present in the printer. The printer further would make a different sound while starting up (it would not make one of the first “rolling sounds” when booting). After fumbling around with the cartridge for a while I found out that there simply was some paper stuck in the printer, after removing this piece of paper the whole issue was gone. Since I found that multiple people encountered the exact same issue I decided to add that info here as well. I guess the confusing “install black cartridge” error is shown instead of a normal paper-jam error message.

 

118 Comments

  • Michal R
    07/12/2017

    Another one fixed here! Thanks! Mine is HP 1212nf – I noticed there’s also a speaker on the board, you might want to remove it too in addition to the battery. I didn’t and the speaker’s plastic cover melted a little bit, but it works:)

  • Ged Haywood
    11/01/2018

    Definitely don’t try the microwave!

    Microwaves work by exciting water molecules. There aren’t many water molecules in your average printed circut board, so you might damage the microwave and/or the board.

  • SUSHANTA ROY
    17/03/2018

    Sir, I have a printer M2727nf is now in a dead condition. It’s formatter board not working…., how do I repair or replace it.

  • Thice
    10/04/2018

    For the M2727nf you can probably follow most of the tutorial. I do not have a M2727nf to test.

  • Ed
    14/08/2018

    Why not examine the board for bad solder joints, and re-melt them with a soldering iron? I would think that “baking” would damage components.

    I have an M1522nf, and found this article by searching for information on replacing the battery, so the date and time stay correct.

  • Thice
    15/08/2018

    Because the bad solder joints are most likely BGA solder joints beneath a chip. So no easy way to solder those, hence the baking.

  • Sean
    17/08/2018

    I have a HP-M1522nf which was in the garage for 2 years due to issue with formatter board, the issue was: I turn it on, it start to loading the firmware and initializing and all fine, after around 2-30 sec, rebooted and start all the process again and again.
    I just find this page last night and gave it a shot, removed the formatter board, removed the battery, put in oven, 400F for exact 8 minutes, after 8 minutes take it out, wait 45 min, let the board cool down, then installed the battery again and installed formatter board inside the printer and reconnect all cables. Turn the printer on, All fixed and now it is working like a charm!!!

    So just wanted to say Thank you.
    P.S: 400F and 8 minutes are the best, i backed a laptop motherboard also with above instructions and now it is working great again too.

  • Brian
    24/09/2018

    Wow! This fix also worked for me and my 1563DNF printer.

    Thank you very much for the simple instructions (and don’t worry, none of the plastic bits melted for me).

    Crossing my fingers that I get to finish of my remaining ink cartridges before it happens again…

  • jskamm
    18/10/2018

    I have a HP Laserjet 1536dnf MFP. Just recently it started to initialize itself and then it would display a “49 error, turn off and on” message. It continued do this over and over again while the network cable was connected. I did everything to try to resolve this. NOTHING worked. Then I had someone on the HP forum suggest baking the formatter board. So I started looking online and found this page. I figured what could it hurt. So following the instructions on this site, I removed the battery and covered my speaker with foil just to be on the safe side, then placed it on a cookie sheet and baked my board at 393 degrees for 8 minutes. When done, I pulled it out and cooled for 45 minutes. I resoldered the battery back on the board and connected the board back to the printer, reconnected the network cable, turned it on and Shazam, It started right up. It initialized and went right into a ready state. I couldn’t freaking believe it. It actually works. I can print and scan through the network now.

    Thanks for your simple instructions.

  • steve mali
    28/03/2019

    trying it now

  • Peter
    22/07/2019

    Merci pour l’astuce, ça marche ! Thank you it works ! Have you find a possibility for to extend over a longer period of time ?

    sincerly, Peter

  • Thice
    29/07/2019

    The only solution against having to bake the board every couple of months seems to be to replace the formatter board.

  • Jose
    09/10/2019

    Solution to me is to avoid HP printers. They earn more money with cheap tin, and fuck the customers. So, HP brand is banned for the rest of my life. My case is an HP 8600. Thanks a lot for the solution anyway.

  • Suresh
    13/06/2020

    Hi
    Thank you so much for such a detailed set of instructions including photos.
    I was about to throw the printer out with extreme frustration and I am glad I found this site.
    Printer is working like magic!!!
    Cant believe it
    thank you so much

  • John
    01/08/2020

    anyone get this board fried by any reason can get this board for about $40 to $50.00 on eBay, I believe it is already pre baked by using professional oven.

    just search CC368-60001 HP LaserJet M1522nf MFP Formatter

    I bought mine long time ago and it ‘disappeared’ after we moved, recently it was ‘re-discovered’ laying in its original box in a corner in our basement. I opened it up and powered it up. everything looked fine and a report could be printed.

    It too me quite long time to figure out how to set up the driver for Windows 10 and how to hook it to network for both scanner and printer. It turns out HP no longer provide support to windows 10 and they only give a ‘universal printer driver’. However, the windows 7 driver worked on windows 10 with some clean up of per-installed HP driver. (anyone needs it search M1522series-win7-full-solution-EMEA4-v4.3, it is available on HP site).

    then this printer is all dressed up and ready to go, but……. it started to dying without any reason after 5 minutes, 1 minute, and more and more refuse to boot and power recycle….

    I was about to throw it away and then bumped into this one. It immediately made sense and after follow the instruction …. IT WORKS now !!!

    Thanks so much !

  • Milan
    26/01/2021

    Yes, it works! Thank you for this page 🙂 200°C for 8 minutes! You can replace the tin foil stands for silicone cupcake forms placed upside down.

  • leon
    03/08/2022

    if you dont have the tools can you just bake with battery iun and leave a pice of foil over and under th tbatery?

  • Thice
    09/08/2022

    I would strongly advise against doing this.

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