When I moved the studio PC to my apartment, I wrote:
it won’t kill me to scan from Windows XP for a few days.
That rather presupposed that Windows XP would go on working, which turned out not to be the case. The PC now reboots and enters an endless reboot loop for no apparent reason. I've tried System Recovery, and while that seemed to break the loop, the PC will run for about half an hour, then suddenly reboot and enter an endless loop again.
I can't even begin to figure out how to fix this, and I don't have time to take the PC to the shop for repairs until at least the weekend. A Windows reinstall is not an option as that would also destroy all the hours of work I spent configuring the Ubuntu linux installed on this dual-boot system as well. And in the case of a hardware problem, that would rob me of functionality I can use to troubleshoot the hardware.
So I'm going to focus on getting the linux installation to recognise the scanner. At least that problem is tractable. I can ask around and figure out what to do. And if the system starts rebooting spontaneously from linux as well, I'll know I've got a hardware problem..
Hints and tips on both the scanner issue (the scanner is an EPSON GT-12000 which SHOULD work under Ubuntu as it worked from the LiveCD. It was present and switched on when Ubuntu 8.4 was installed) and the possible cause of the reboot loop are highly welcome and may just save the comic - the odds of new Feral updates appearing are nil until I am able to scan from a reliable system. Comments recommending me to get a Mac will be treated as spam unless accompanied by donations of € 500 or more. Besides, the iBook I've already got also went into a reboot loop earlier this week (it got better).
Update: Glorious SCSI-based A3-scanning under Ubuntu now works. I don't like the look of Ubuntu 8.4 much, but I can deal with it. So all I need to do for now is change my boot parameters so I default to linux again. I'll leave the Windows OS on the PC for a while in case I can fix it somehow.
