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I recently installed a SCSI card (Kofax 650) into my Linux workstation and have been racking my brains trying to get it to work.

I can see that the SCSI card is detected by my BIOS and my operating system, openSUSE tumbleweed, and it seems to have drivers installed and working however when I connected my SCSI device, a HP dds-4 tape drive, it was not detected by my OS or BIOS.

I checked that the jumpers on the bottom were set correctly and the SCSI id was set to 0 however it still wasn’t working. I tried different drives, with different cables and terminators however I am not detecting anything under Linux.

I tried to get to the same point under Windows 7 however I could not find any drivers and windows 10 decided to corrupt its page file and also not automatically install drivers, which it has for the SCSI card, so I could not get it wo work there. If anyone has any ideas about what could be wrong in my SCSI configuration or setup, please comment.

Dave M
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Luca
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    Did SCSI _disks_ previously work with this controller? Since it seems to be sold as a "SCSI scanner controller", are you sure it isn't artificially limited to only scanners? – u1686_grawity May 20 '23 at 12:10
  • thanks @user1686, the card appears as an inito 9100uf under opensuse. the inito card is designed for harddrives and other scsi devices so potentially it could work. I might need to update fhe firmware on the card because it could be limiting what devices it is usable on however I would have to reinstall windows. I do need to get a new scsi controller however so I will look into one that should hopefully work well – Luca May 20 '23 at 13:36
  • For scsi, I'd use `lsscsi` to list the attached devices. You should confirm whether you have loaded the `st.ko` module. – Bib May 20 '23 at 16:16

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The Kofax 650 is not a general SCSI card. It is for use with a specific type of scanner only. It is unlikely, although not entirely impossible, that it can be used with the tape drive.

The main problem is the termination of the bus. The Kofax card should terminate the bus (all the scanner-SCSI cards that I've seen do that). On the other side of the bus there must also be terminated.

Ljm Dullaart
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  • Thanks, The card does not appear as a kofax card on the os however, it is detected as an INI 9100 card without any kofax branding... the ini9100 series does seem to be a generic scsi card so potentialy kofax just bought it and sold rebranded or with a modded firmware. There does seem to be some sort of connector on the card which looks similar to those which powered the old 1.44mb flopy drives so mabe I need to buy an extension to get a power cable to reach? this could be the issue because I doubt that a pci interface carries the power needed for a scsi bus. Thank you very much for the help. – Luca May 20 '23 at 13:27