HP Photosmart 3210 Printer Head Cleaning

A modern HP hardware video for once, but it has good retro stuff as a reward if you stick to the end. My HP 3210 Photosmart inkjet clogged and repeated head cleaning cycles would not help. I could not find any instructions on how to clean the head manually - and for good reason, the head is not removable in this machine, so this was really difficult. Attempt at your own risk. For public service value, here is how I did it. Turns out part of the head cleaning mechanism was actually broken, which probably caused both clogging and ink flooding problems. I suspect that must have happened to the many other users complaining online about the same symptoms. Then after I repaired it and unclogged the heads and ink tubes, one of my cartridges went empty. I got the dreaded, non-resettable, "ink system has failed error 0xc18a0206" (which is misleading printer techno-babble for: your cartridge is empty sooner than I expected)! And there is apparently no way to reset this. Actually there was. Not shown in the video, see instructions below on how to clear this. All is good in the end, as usual, but don't forget to see what happens after that...

So here are some very important secret key combinations for the HP 3210 and related units:

Clearing the infamous "ink system has failed 0xc18a0206" error message (provided you unclogged the heads beforehand): hold cancel and OK while you power down, and keep holding while you power back up until it eventually powers down again. Then press power on, you'll enter the OOB NVRAM reset and launch a long clean and reset of the inkjet system. If the system is unclogged, the crippling error will be cleared.

Advanced firmware menus access: press the left and right arrows arrows together. Then enter one of three codes:
1,2,3
1,2,4
1,2,7
Each leads to a different advanced firmware menu which you can navigate using the left and right arrow , OK and cancel keys. You can even restart the machine in manufacturing maintenance mode (at your own risk, I did not try!).

Видео HP Photosmart 3210 Printer Head Cleaning канала CuriousMarc