Multiple problems: SF6.6r1a/Nikon8000ED/Intel MacPro/Leopard

[hdinin]

Welcome, and, if I may say, odd place (this particular thread, which is now 18 months old since inception of the problem--long since resolved incidentally) to start your forum journey of gaining wisdom...

If Thomas is still listening in (we are, after all, up to 6.6r4a... very important that "a" as it turned out, with the advent of Snow Leopard) and one never knows what happens to people in the arcane world of software development.

I did figure out the problem, and my only regret is that I didn't remember to get back to this thread and add the resolution to my specific problem to the mix of knowledge here. That's why I hope Thomas is listening in... Maybe this will be helpful.

The problem was not software, per se, but hardware. Specifically, it was the firmware (I am assuming) in a passle of Western Digital external drives, marketed for Macs in particular under the product name of "My Book - Studio Edition" (the designation "studio" in the name is a sop to the Macintosh owners, who are used to having Firewire access to peripherals, instead of being mired in the dubious (and narrow bandwidth) world of the universal USB2). I have, or had, several of these drives. They are all replaced now. It seems no matter which port on them is used, they produced the behavior described in the original post I sent... Erratic behavior of the Nikon scanner on FW, with SliverFast.

The Western DIgital drives (an investment of almost 2000 dollars) have been mothballed or disposed of. They join the LaCie drives (packaged and marketed for Mac) that I had discarded for similar reasons -- multiple spontaneous catastrophic failures.

I now use drives in third party enclosures with either eSATA ports or FW800, and I use Seagate (preferably) or Western DIgital, and the odd Hitachi, drives, bought as OEM raw drives for installation.

The only amusing note here is to listen to different salesmen at Microcenter, my local retail supply source for these geeky things, as they espouse one brand of drive or another... They never really offer a substantive and objective reason, they just swear by this brand or that, or tell customers (or me, if I am foolhardy enough to ask where something is that I'm looking for) simply NOT to buy, say, the 1TB Seagate drives as they are all defective and practically guaranteed to fail. Trust him, they've all come back to the store... I guess Seagate doesn't know about this.

In all events, the lesson here is, not to give up, and to keep tracking the solution until you find it, and the only way to look is first in the obvious places (duh, it's not plugged in... or the cable is defective) and then don't rule out anything, including what you assume is a trusted link in the chain. Like hardware that never failed under any other circumstances.

Howard

[LSI_Luebker]

Dear Howard,

thank you for your feedback on this issue.

[Dave Stilwell]

Speaking only of the problem with recognition of the hardware, I humbly wonder if the anomaly relative to multiple Firewire devices is endemic to the scanner. In the original manual, Nikon was very stern in its command that you must never attempt to use the 9000 while another Firewire device was connected and running. The other thing I found (after considerable cursing and ranting) was that I had to have the film carrier advanced before starting the software, just as Nikon advised in the Scan manual. Just a thought, hope it can help someone.

Dave Stilwell

[LSI_Morales]

Dear Steve,

Thanks for your contribution

What Nikon states it true not only to Nikon devices but to any FireWire imaging device, the same can even be true for USB imaging devices.
Yes, the film holder should be inserted into the scanner before starting the program.

Cheers