[ILUG] scanner, oh scanner, where for art thou...

[Brendan Kehoe]

Last week I finally received a scanner that I'd ordered, which opens the door
to me being able to scan in receipts and just email an expense report, instead
of going to a secretarial service to have 'em photocopied and then physically
mailed.  I'm psyched!

I was even able to use a spreadsheet to do the math and money conversions and
the works.  So now it's just a question of scanning in the torrent of little
receipts for the trip I recently took, and that'll complete the set.

So over the weekend I plug in the scanner, but no dice, the machine isn't
seeing it.  Then I realize I'd forgotten that SCSI cables need to be
relatively short, and take off the 6' cable I'd added to it.  (The result with
the cable made my office/guest room/den/cave look better by having the scanner
on a bookshelf; oh well, it's not a tourist attraction after all.)  Also put
the SCSI terminator on the second of two SCSI ports on the scanner, realizing
that's necessary too.  Start the system back up, voila, the SCSI adapter sees
it!  I install the SANE package, and successfully scan in an image.  Woo hoo!!

My scanner doesn't have a power switch, so later (after everything's been shut
down) I unplug its power plug.  Hmm, next time I boot up the SCSI adapter
can't see anything (says it's timing out).  Fine.  I unplug the 68-pin
ultra-mini-cutesy-scsi plug leading to the scanner from the back of my
machine, and try again.  Voila, it's fine.

Ok, now I plug the SCSI plug for the scanner back into the machine, plug the
power cord for the scanner into the surge protector, and finally put the other
end of the power cord into the scanner.  Its light goes on, it does a couple
of initialization humms, and it's there and ready, just like last time.

Here we go...I turn on the machine; nada, it doesn't see it.  Gah.  I make
sure that all of the plugs are plugged in firmly; I move the cable going from
the scanner to the machine to not be lying across any other cables, like the
machine's power cables, thinking perhaps something else weird is going on.
Try again---nope.  The scanner's been sitting on top of the machine thus far
(the machine's this nearly even-square shaped thing), so I try putting it down
on the floor, thinking maybe some odd magnetic thing's going on.  Try
again---nope.  Hrm.  Swap the terminator & the cable plug on the back of the
scanner, try again, nope.  Nope nope nope.  All 68 pins appear to be fine on
the end of the SCSI cable.

I did notice that if I did a soft reset, my adapter (Adaptec AHA-294X
Ultra2 SCSI host adapter) might turn on me and say it can't find the SCSI
BIOS, and go right ahead with trying for either a floppy or CD-ROM boot.  Only
if I do a hard reset will it go back to being able to boot.  Hmm...well, s'ok
since it's able to find everything and use it all correctly.  (Once I've
unplugged the scanner's scsi cable from the 68-pin port, of course.)

The system is running RedHat 6.0, and as I mentioned yesterday it was able to
see it and use it just fine.

Now I'm turning to you folks.  Anyone ever encountered this sort of thing
before?  Any guesses on other things I might be able to do?

Thanks,
B

-- 
Brendan Kehoe

Web page: http://www.zen.org/~brendan/