Using SCSI based film scanners on modern systems

Background & Motivation

Scanning your film at home is a very compelling option given how quickly the costs can add up at the Lab, for me it would cost an extra £8-10 for the high quality scanning option per role. Today there are three realistic ways to digitise your film at home: flatbed scanners like the Epson v850, DSLR/Mirrorless scanning and dedicated film scanners. Each has it’s own pros & cons.

Flatbed scanners are probably the most accessible and easy option. Something like the v850 is USB plug ‘n’ play on a modern computer and it requires very little setup whilst still gaining adequate results for most use cases. The two main problems I see with flatbeds is; A. they’re pretty expensive going from around £400-1000 depending on which of the product line you go for (v600, v700 etc) and B. the effective resolution is often much lower than quoted and they tend to produce fairly soft results when zooming in.

DSLR scanning has become increasingly popular, but it brings its own set of challenges, not only do you need a decent camera to begin with you will also need several other items such as: macro lens, copy stand or similar, light source, film holder. These items quickly add up in cost and I found the workflow even with my camera tethered to lightroom was quite painful with needing to move the film holder then make sure focus was still good then every so often swap out the film in the holder.

Dedicated film scanners, either the few new options or older SCSI based models, avoid most of these issues. They were designed with calibrated light sources and accurate film placement and can include features like auto focusing for sharpness and ICE (dust removal in software). Once you have one setup you can get very repeatable, high quality results.

From this (in my opinion!) if you’re on a budget and want a relatively painless workflow, a dedicated film scanner is the way to go.Choosing a SCSI interface

The core problem with this choice is that if you go for a cheaper, older scanner it will most likely be SCSI. Modern PCs not only don’t have SCSI ports, there’s not even really a market for any sort of adapter. Most of the adapters for SCSI were made by ‘adaptec’ and the majority of well supported and affordable ones are for PCI which is an older style port to PCIe.

Why PCI over PCIe

SCSI scanners were sold with parallel SCSI interfaces, these are large multi wire cables with 50 ppin or 68 pin connectors. This was the gold standard for connecting external devices to computers years ago but are now basically extinct on modern computers in favour of much more modern standards like USB etc. In my research there are relatively few options for adding PCIe SCSI cards to your PC as they were generally aimed at servers and are hard to find these days. The majority of <£50 cards you’ll find on eBay are PCI cards. Finding a motherboard with PCI slots is often easier and cheaper than trying to get a PCIe based SCSI adapter to work in a modern system.

In my case I bought the Adaptec AVA2903B but any card from that family should work with this method just fine

Hardware Selection

I’ll add some quick notes here as to what desktop hardware you could chose. I happened to have 3 Lenovo ThinkStation desktops with core i5’s and DDR3 memory making them fairly modern, certainly enough to run a desktop and scanning software. These being modern enough did present some issues at the Windows XP installation stage that I unfortunately can’t recall in detail but given I didn’t go with XP in the end, it didn’t ultimately matter. Enterprise designed desktop systems I believe would be a good thing to look for because offices quite often keep legacy hardware lying around and manufacturers know this, so finding something like this that was from the time of PCIe yet still had a singular PCI slot for compatibility wasn’t too hard. Consumer desktops from this era I can’t imagine bothered adding old PCI slots but this is purely anecdotal based on what I found at the time.

First Attempt: Windows XP

The most logical starting point I thought at the time was Windows XP. These SCSI cards and scanners (plus their software) were all designed around NT, XP etc and the vendor drivers should be readily available. On paper, it should have been the path of least resistence

In practice, it was anything but

Activation and Availability

The first problem I encountered was simply obtaining a usable copy of Windows XP. All the available downloads online are for unverified ISOs and each time it was a long winded install only to come across issues such as: licensing, drivers or completely broken installations.

Windows XP activation relies on deprecated infrastructure via either online systems or phone activation. There are many work arounds to this online you can find and I was successful in getting an activated XP install but then ran into issues further on.

Security Risks

Using Windows XP today also carries a lot of security risks. XP has been out of support for years, lacks modern HTTPS/TLS support and cannot be safely connected to the internet. This means relying on USB sticks for everything from software installs to getting your digitized film off once processed. While isolation and air-gapping are possible, they add a lot of complexity that I’d rather not deal with.

Lack of Driver Availability

For the number of successful XP installations I got, driver support was the next obstacle. None of the installations I tried included native support for the adaptec card, nor could I find one to download anywhere. At this point I was giving up on the idea of using the film scanner as I had perceived needing to use the original scanner software and drivers as a must. I had even tried my Apple Macintosh LC II but that unfortunately had too little in the way of RAM to run anything that would use the scanner.

Second Attempt: Windows 7

In my search to find working drivers to my card I stumbled on this thread

https://www.sevenforums.com/drivers/105706-scsi-driver-win7-pro-64-bits-4.html

this was a community adapted driver for using the adaptec cards on Windows 7/8 (it’s important to note that this project was first done when these were still supported despite 10 being out. Now you’re in a similar but less risky boat as XP with EOL support).

Fortunately my ex-office Lenovo ThinkStations I was using had a Windows 7 license sticker on them so I went ahead and installed that. This driver, besides now being for an EOL OS, actually sounded quite promising and is something you could go for if you really want to use Windows. Unfortunately for me this driver seemed to work for nearly every AHA-29xxx/AVA-29xxx card out there but mine. You can see confirmations of it working with AVA-2902/2904/2906/2910 but I can tell you my AVA-2903B doesn’t make an appearance from other users comments nor did it work when I tried it. Alas Windows 7 was not an option. (To be honest I could’ve just spent £30 on different model card but I found my solution before my stubbornnes wore off).

The Solution: Linux

At this point I realised something that I honestly should’ve realised earlier; Linux often just works with everything. The reason this was a bit of an embarrassingly late realisation is that I’m a Linux Engineer so I probably shouldn’t of spent so much time messing around with Windows XP in the first place.

Modern Linux distributions still include support for a wide range of legacy hardware, including classic PCI SCSI controllers. These drivers were written when the hardware was current, kept stable over time, and never tied to vendor installers, activation systems, or OS-specific packaging. As a result, they’ve simply carried on working.

The SCSI card drivers

One detail I don’t clearly remember is whether the SCSI driver was already present and simply loaded automatically, or whether I had to enable it manually. In practice, even manually loading is easy on Linux.

In most modern distributions, the required Adaptec SCSI drivers are already built into the kernel or shipped as standard kernel modules. If the hardware is detected at boot, the correct module will often load automatically with no user intervention at all.

In cases where it doesn’t, enabling the driver is still trivial. It’s a matter of loading a kernel module rather than installing third-party software. There’s no separate installer, no reboot loops, and no version-matching exercise.

Typical steps, if manual loading is required, look like this:

lspci | grep -i scsi
lsmod | grep aic
sudo modprobe aic7xxx   # or aic79xx depending on which card you bought
dmesg | grep -i scsi

(you may need to install any commands that don’t work off the shelf but they’re all part of at least Fedora’s main repos)

An important thing to note about SCSI devices is that you need to have the end device, in this case the scanner, powered on and connected to the computer before you power the computer on. If you ever turn off the scanner you’ll generally need to power cycle your computer too.

Why New Linux Installs Succeed With Such Old Hardware

The difference comes down to philosophy. Linux treats old hardware as something to be supported as long as it remains useful, not something to be discarded once the vendor loses interest. Driver support isn’t gated behind installers, licensing systems, or OS version checks. If the code still builds and the hardware still works, it stays.

Linux Distros

I installed Fedora Desktop, this is purely as most of my background in Linux is from the downstream Red Hat OS and therefore a Fedora based distro suited me. You could also go for Ubuntu or anything similar you fancy. However if you are new to Linux I would highly recommend choosing Ubuntu Desktop first or Fedora Desktop second as these are the most user friendly (in my opinion!!)

Scanner Software: Vuescan

With the idea of using Windows NT/XP out the window, the remaining question was which software to use. I had the original disc of Minolta software, new and sealed in it’s box, waiting to be used. Unfortunately that would never run on anything later than XP. This is where VuesScan comes in, any software you use needs to be able to talk to the specific model of scanner. The father and son duo who create VueScan, Ed & Dave Hamrick, have managed to “reverse engineer over 7400 scanners and included built in drivers in VueScan so you can keep using the scanner you already have.” as from the front page of hamrick.com where you can get VueScan.

This is not an advertisement of the software and quite rightly it’s not free besides a trial. But I can say I’ve had no issues with the software and it has been painless to use. I even had one on one email support from Ed when my ‘Dimage Multi Scan II’ wouldn’t work scanning 35mm, this turned out to be a fault with the scanner itself not the software so I use a F-2900 for 35mm and the Multi II for 120 film.

VueScan is also available on Windows so I was very thankful to see it also ran on Linux natively. Once installed and with the drivers running on Linux my scanners were now fully plug ‘n’ play and worked like new. VueScan has profiles for each scanner and you can adjust nearly all the options your detected device allows.

Final Working Setup

Lenovo ThinkStation Desktop with PCI support

Adaptec AVA-2903B PCI SCSI Adapter

Fedora Desktop

VueScan

From a workflow perspective, this behaves like a normal modern workstation. Scans can be written directly to local storage, NAS, or backed up to cloud. There’s no need for air-gapping, file shuffling via USB sticks, or maintaining an old PC purely for scanning.

Modern Fedora Desktop works just like any modern OS with networking, and security updates as expected, making the system viable for long-term use rather than a fragile one-off solution.