Problems with Epson 836XL Scanner and My PowerMac G4 Gigabit Ethernet...

Have you visited here? Epson Expression 836XL, Overview - Technical Support - Epson America, Inc. I think your best support will come from Epson itself.

I notice that drivers for that particular model of Epson are for OS 9 and earlier, and that the product is discontinued. How old is the Epson scanner, and which MacOS are you using?

I have checked out Epson and know they only made drivers to work up till OS 9 for this scanner. The Epson 836XL is over 10 years old, but I have also read its one of their better scanners out there and if you can get them running on your system you shouldn't pass them up.
I'm running MAC OS X 10.4 Tiger on my PowerMAC G4 Gigabit Ethernet tower It has a 1.8 single processor and 2GB of SDRAM. I have read quite a few places that other mac users running the same OS have had success getting this scanner up and running with Vuescan.

After I wrote this last night I realized I still can run a Classic environment in Tiger. It was late so I decided not to jump into last night. I'm going to try and run the drivers in classic and see if that works after work today.

Ideally I would like to have it running in OS X Tiger with Vuescan. The way I have it hooked is with an Adaptec AHA 2930 PCI card a SCSI 1 to SCSI 2 adapter and a SCSI cable.

I will put any updates (successful or not) after I have tired the classic enviroment and let you know how it goes.

No luck with installing OS 9 on my G4 PowerMAC running OS 10.4.11.
I'm thinking about installing Panther 10.3 and seeing if I can get classic to run from that.

If anyone has had luck with running Classic under 10.4.11 let me know. I keep getting a message about not having the latest version of Quicktime and then I go too update and it just pops up with another window saying error and my only option is to quit.

Like I said before I will keep my progress up to date.

Here is a screen capture of system profiler. Highlighted is the Adaptec PCI card I installed. I know the PowerMAC recognizes it but I can't get a connection to the scanner. I have even installed the drivers for this PCI card and with no luck.

If the scanner is reputed to run under Classic, have you considered putting an OS 9 dedicated hard drive in your G4? It can be done quite cheaply.
You'll note in my profile the mention of a b/w G3 350. What is doesn't show is that the G3 has two drives, one with Panther, the other with OS 9.2.2. I can boot the G3 into Classic from a 40 Gb drive in order to run pre-OS X software and older SCSI hardware (OS 9 doesn't much like USB). Quirky, maybe, but it works.

I'm almost certain you've thought about upgrading the scanner. Should it boil down to that, consider the Epson V500 if you're scanning photos, or the GT1500 for documents only.

It's funny cause we just bought this scanner(one, its still a solid scanner and worka great if not better then some new models, two, It was within our budget and we need the size which is 12.2 by 17.7 our company scans large illustrations and paintings) I had a feeling this would be something hard to get running.
I'm currently in the process of taking a 20GB drive that is still housed in my PowerMAC G4 and installing OS 9 on it.

I know I will get it up and running soon. Hoping that someone has dealt with this same problem on this message board.

I will def update how it goes. Once I get it I will post it.

Developments? http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/ot...ooking-driver-scsi-magneto-optical-drive.html

I have made some progress too why it hasn't connected yet. I will post in detail tonight.
That link is good insight by the way, I have already told my business partner that there is a possibility that it's the cable as well.

Ok so I have a new problem.
Since this scanner has OS 9 drivers I figured I can just run classic. Well a couple years ago I deleted everything in the classic folder. So in turn classic will not boot up. I currently have a OS 9 boot disc and when I try to install OS 9 on my machine on to another HD I have currently installed in my tower it starts up classic then tells me I need 9.1 to install OS 9.
I have tired to boot from disc on start up and that has left me with a bigger problem I had to deal with. When I would try and boot from disc it wouldn't boot and would just go too grey screen. Then when I would try to boot back in too OS X holding option after a restart it would only bring up the OS 9 disc and there was no way I could boot back into OS X. This problem set me back quit a few hours. Long story short aftering backing up my system and reinstalling it with superduper it booted back into OS X.

If anyone could tell me how to get OS 9 installed or how to get classic running after I deleted the files in that folder it would be a big help towards getting this scanner running.

Post a screenshot of the OS 9 disk you're trying to use to install Classic. It should be a disk with a white upper face and a gold-colored 9 on it.

It seems you have a dedicated OS 9 drive. If it's already formatted, http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=50447 it should show up in either Startup Disk (OS X Sys Prefs) or Control Panels (OS 9).

Did you get the Epson scanner to work with your setup?

I have the same scanner and I'm trying to acquire a machine to work with. It seems as if a G4 tower, preferably one of the gigabit MDD versions would be the best way to go and use VueScan. I was told version 9.0.96 would work with PowerPC.

Any thoughts or updates to the process? I didn't purchase a computer yet and would welcome any suggestions that have worked.

Thanks!

Well this thread is five years old.

Suggest you buy an Intel model, and at least a 2012 model at that.

Thanks for the suggestion harryb2448, but an Intel machine with a SCSI connection is expensive. A new scanner of comparable quality/size is over $2000.

I'd like to hear from people who have solutions other than spend large sums of money.

Get any cheap Windows machine made after 1994 - apparently Epson has drivers all the way from Win 95 to Win 7.

Rfive said:

I have the same scanner and I'm trying to acquire a machine to work with. It seems as if a G4 tower, preferably one of the gigabit MDD versions would be the best way to go and use VueScan. I was told version 9.0.96 would work with PowerPC.

Any thoughts or updates to the process? I didn't purchase a computer yet and would welcome any suggestions that have worked.

Thanks!

Click to expand...

Hello,

I was shot an e mail a couple of days ago and thought it was funny since this post is almost 5 years old.

To get to the point of the scanner.

I ended up hooking my 836xl to my PC. It's running Windows 32bit due to Adaptec PCI drivers only working with a 32bit system. I run another Windows 7 64bit as my main OS and keep the 32bit boot-able OS for just the scanning.

I will give you all the details once I get home I'm about to leave the studio. There is hope to getting your 836XL running.

Rfive said:

I have the same scanner and I'm trying to acquire a machine to work with. It seems as if a G4 tower, preferably one of the gigabit MDD versions would be the best way to go and use VueScan. I was told version 9.0.96 would work with PowerPC.

Any thoughts or updates to the process? I didn't purchase a computer yet and would welcome any suggestions that have worked.

Thanks!

Click to expand...

Here is the details.

I tired my best to get it to work with my Gigabit Ethernet G4 PowerPC, with no luck. The system recognized it but Vuescan couldn't connect to it.

Go with a PC on this one, you will save yourself a lot of possible problems.

As I was looking up the Adaptec cards tonight and the drivers to set you in the right direction, I notice that in their driver section that they have a 64bit Windows 7 driver. I will give this a go and see if it works on my 64bit OS.

Adaptec SCSI Card | eBay

You can see the PCI cards are fairly cheap.

You want a SCSI 1 to SCSI 2

SCSI 1 to SCSI 2 | eBay

That is pretty much it. Once you get these and Vuescan you're good to go!

Let me know if you have any questions.

Last summer I bought a 1640XL, this model still works with current MAC OS. I was stoked because again got it for a good price. Only problem, the seller forgot to lock the scanning head when he shipped it out. The boxed was tossed around making the scanning head get bent out of shape. It scans but at an angle and and sometimes gives a "rainbow effect" to the scanned piece.

Rounding out the conversation.

After installing Hamrick VueScan 9.0.96, the scanner is recognized perfectly by the CPU. The OS is 10.4.11 with Classic. The CPU is M7681LL/A*, which cost $20.

Rfive said:

Rounding out the conversation.

After installing Hamrick VueScan 9.0.96, the scanner is recognized perfectly by the CPU. The OS is 10.4.11 with Classic. The CPU is M7681LL/A*, which cost $20.

Click to expand...

That's Great! Glad you have it running, enjoy the scanner! regardless of it being almost 15 years old it still works great!