Meat Plow Inscribed thus:

On Tue, 03 Nov 2009 22:20:47 +0000, Baron
wrote:

Meat Plow wrote:

On Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:27:20 -0800, David Nebenzahl
wrote:

So I made up a SCSI cable for the scanner I got off the street
(literally), an Agfa SnapScan 1236. (Had to cobble up the cable
since my SCSI host adapter has a high-density socket but the scanner
has the old 25-pin socket.) The cable's a bit ugly, with something
of a rat's nest of wires soldered together in the middle, but it
works. Scanner works fine.

But since using the scanner, I've found that sometimes--not
always--the scanner seems to be causing a hardware fault that causes
Windows blue screens. Sometimes I can boot up and do dozens of
scans; other times the BSOD appears some time after booting, or when
I access the scanner driver.

At first I wasn't sure whether the blue screens were due to the
scanner itself or the scanner driver, but I'm pretty sure it's the
former, as I never get them when I unplug the scanner.

I'm sure part of the problem can be traced to Windows 2000's rather
****-poor SCSI handling. While it is definitely better than Windows
NT, which *really* sucked in that way, it's still problematic.

And the fact that I don't have a terminator on the scanner might not
be helping, either. But as I said, when it works I can do many scans
with no problems.

I should say that this isn't a critical problem for me. I have
another scanner that works about as well (a Microtek using USB) that
works about as well; the Agfa just happens to be a bit faster and
not as annoyingly noisy. I'm mainly curious why I'm having these
problems.

Any guesses? (Educated ones get more points.)

Oh, almost forgot:

o OS: Windows 2000, SP 2
o Advansys SCSI host adapter ("fast/wide"), but I'm using regular
old single-ended SCSI II. The Advansys is basically a clone of the
old Adaptec 1542, but with two adapters (16 SCSI IDs) on one card.
There are two CD-ROM drives (Plextor) on the same bus as the
scanner. o Motherboard is an Asus something-or-other, almost 10
years old

What's the hex number reported on the blue screen. And terminate the
chain. Lots of bsods are driver oriented IRQ_DOES_NOT_EQUAL stuff
accompanied by a hex cod and the culprit modules.

Isn't the Snapscan internally terminated ? ie only has a single 25
pin data socket.

Don't know. Most of the scanners I've owned had a chain port where a
terminator would be installed if its the last device.

I've used both. Usually if its a 25 pin or single socket on the
scanner, its internally terminated. If there are two sockets, its
probably not and requires terminating.

--
Best Regards:
Baron.