Hi!

(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.)

Twenty five pin SCSI cabling is, ah, not the most desireable thing to have.
It's a Macintosh thing and thankfully not very common elsewhere.

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.

You can often get away with some truly impressive stuff on lower speed SCSI
setups. I've seen an IBM PS/2 Model 65 that came to me with termination
enabled on both hard drives and it *worked* when I got it. I suspect it
worked for many years, as it was a Netware server well into the late 90s and
quite possibly the early 2000s.

I cleaned the large amount of dust out and it stopped working with SCSI
related errors at POST. Fixing the double termination solved it. The errors
were baffling until I examined the drives and said "there is no way that can
be right".

But if you can, don't use a hacked up, homemade SCSI cable. Cables exist to
do what you want and they can still even be found. Price might be an issue,
but if you can wait and shop around...it will be less of one.

The following old discussion (short link)
http://lnk.nu/groups.google.com/12aa is probably mostly humorous in nature,
but it does point out one truth in dealing with SCSI, credited to a John
Woods:

"SCSI is *NOT* magic. There are *fundamental technical reasons* why it is
necessary to sacrifice a young goat to your SCSI chain now and then."

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.

I've never noticed a particularly serious problem with either. But then
again, I've always run brand name equipment from Adaptec, BusLogic, LSI
Logic, IBM and Mylex. The few times I've run into less well known SCSI
adapters, I have found something that was troublesome.

Well, CD burning was an adventure, but I think it had more to do with what
hardware revision of a given IBM MCA SCSI adapter was expected by the
Windows NT driver.

o OS: Windows 2000, SP 2

Some reason why you're not using the latest service pack and post SP4
rollup? You probably should be, unless some situation with software
precludes your doing so.

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.

I guess I'd question how good of a clone it really is. After you fix the
cable, that is. The nature of the card (as you describe it) sounds very odd
to me.

There are two CD-ROM drives (Plextor) on the same bus as the
scanner.

Is termination set properly? Don't rely on autotermination to get it
right--set it yourself! The devices at each end of the SCSI chain should be
terminated. In most cases, the SCSI adapter is electrically in the middle of
the internal and external buses. So, you'd terminate the last device on the
internal cable and the scanner, leaving the host adapter unterminated.

William