LaserSoft Imaging

Hello,
In the previous 6 months I was running AI 6 on Jaguar/mac G4 400 with 1 GB ram/Adaptec 2903B SCSI/PS 7/Howtek 7500 Drum Scanner - everything was fine.

I had to move that computer to another location to drive other devices, and switched the howtek to a dual 533 mac with 1.5 GB ram. This computer has os 9.1/Jaguar/Panther spread across 4 hard drives. I also have Photoshop 6,7,and CS on this workstation. I have an adaptec 2903B SCSI and a 2906 SCSI in the computer. I am running dual monitors.
I have approx 250GB of free space across the 4 hard drives


I just downloaded the latest SF upgrade - version 6.2.1r4 for Howtek.

Here is what I have encountered:
a)OS 9.1/Photoshop 6/2903B SCSI works fine and I can scan.

b)Jaguar and Panther encounter the following-
Photoshop 7/2903B SCSI - no scanner found message comes up when try to open silverfast
Photoshop CS/2903B SCSI - not enough memory left for prescan message comes up when trying to prescan

Adaptec 2906 SCSI does not work with any combination of silverfast/howtek (although panther and this scsi are happy with my imacon scanner)

Here are the solutions I have tried

1. delete all silverfast prefs from all required places and restart silverfast - no changes anywhere

2. tried swapping SCSI cards, each card by itself, together, in different PCI slots - no change

3. tried unhooking my dual monitors one each time and rebooting - no changes

4. all most recent updates to SCSI have been downloaded and installed

5. I removed the 2903B SCSI from my other workstation, and tried both in this new workstation - both 2903B's act identical in this computer.

One thing I noticed in system profiler:

2906 not visible anywhere anytime
2903B under panther shows up, but not howtek
2903B under jaguar shows up as 8 PCI cards in 8 different slots (even though my computer has 4 slots, all full, and only one 2903B) - consequently the howtek shows up 8 times under silverfast, all generate error of not enough memory for prescan

So for now I am going against this deadline scanning the batch of negs in OS 9.1 . . . not really happy about that, but very happy I am at least able to scan!

Any ideas?

many thanks,
Tony

Dear Tony

as you describe the situation it seems that updating to Panther and Photoshop CS have created certain troubles.

Despite your prior successes, please note that according to Adaptec
http://www.adaptec.com/worldwide/suppor ... c_osx_info
the 2903B is not Mac OS X compliant, at least not officially.

About the 2906 not showing up in the Apple System Profiler: Mine doesn't, too, and still works in Panther (after installing Adaptec driver update, though, which Adaptec and Apple claim to be no longer necessary with OS X 10.3).
Please note that the 2906 is considered as having been only tested minimally with Panther (answer ID 8183):
http://ask.adaptec.com/cgi-bin/adaptec_ ... 1053475200

BTW: The SCSI controller card should show up in the PCI section, whereas the SCSI scanner in the SCSI section of the ASP.

The 2903B is most likely be shown eight times because of multiple LUN (logical unit numbers) which are issued to the card itself - this is an awkward situation, as this causes conflicts with other SCSI devices being attached to that given controller (this is less problematic when the scanner is issued more than one LUN).

Please note that Panther is different from Jaguar when it comes to SCSI devices. There are two internal methods of installation, setup and communication for the operating system OS X: Of these two, the 'IOSCSIdevice' is no longer available with 10.3, leaving the 'SCSITaskInterface' for SCSI hardware access only.

In plain English: Panther does connect to SCSI devices via a kind of firewire-to-SCSI-bridge.

Even though SilverFast seems to be able to connect to the Howtek scanner with PS CS and generates an error when trying to prescan, the error might not mean more than a simple "communication failure". During SilverFast startup a relatively low speed for device detection only is used while for real data transaction with the data normal SCS bus speed is used.

From the support side I need to say that SilverFast relies on both, controller card and scanner being correctly detected and installed into the system, showing up in the ASP.

What I did not understand is your installation setup?
Do you have PS 7 and CS installed two times in two separate OS setups Jaguar and Panther?

On the panther hard drives I have all 3 verisons of photoshop. On the jaguar hard drive I have no photoshop - but run the program from one of the other hard drives - no reason really, just was too lazy to install cs and 7 on another hard drive.

Do you think I could buy a firewire to SCSI adapter and run successfully under panther and CS? any model to recommend.

thanks again,
Tony

Dear Tony

actually I don't see a reason why PS7 running under Panther should give you a problem (you were running this configuration before), but:

2903B under jaguar shows up as 8 PCI cards in 8 different slots (even though my computer has 4 slots, all full, and only one 2903B) - consequently the howtek shows up 8 times under silverfast, all generate error of not enough memory for prescan

was probably not like you've had it before on your G4/400.

Looks like hardware incompatibilities between mainboard and the SCSI controller card. On the other hand though, I would have suspected that Adaptec did test the 2903B in dual G4 Macintosh computers, too.

We had positive experience with the Belkin F5U541 firewire-to-SCSI adapter, especially with Panther and G5 systems.