How to fix HP scanning errors in MacOS

If you made the mistake of buying an HP printer, you might encounter one of the following problems:

• The scanner does not work. Both HP Easy Scan and the OSX Printers and Scanners utilities fail. Printing might still work.
• In HP Easy Scan, you get a message that says Scanner reported an error: An error occurred while communicating with the scanner
• In the OSX Printers and Scanners utility, you get a message that says An error occurred while communicating with the scanner. (-9923)

I had this problem with my HP M28w multifunction printer. The HP support forums were useless, but I managed to fix it.

The following things did not work:

• Rebooting the printer
• Restarting HP Easy Scan
• Resetting the print system

One of these things fixed scanning for me:

1. Disable IPv6 on the printer. You can do this by opening HP Utility. In Network > IPv6, deactivate IPv6 and save the settings. It did not seem to fix my issue, but it worked for many other users.
2. Run HP Easy Start again and reinstall everything. When I did this, I got a message that said System Extension cannot be used: The system extension “/Library/Extensions/hp_fax_io.kext” was installed improperly and cannot be used. Please try reinstalling it, or contact the product’s vendor for an update. I simply deleted that file. The printer started working again.