Dave, > A few updates. > > 1) I have confirmed that the CD Writer still functions fine. > > 2) I forced the SCSI card to use IRQ 4 (serial ports are disabled). No > change. I pulled some extra, unused cards out of the system and also > moved the SCSI card to a different slot. No change. > > I'm going to try XSane .92 now.
As Oliver already wrote, updating XSane will probably not change very much regarding the crash. You could try to use another version of sane-backends, but I have doubts that this will help. Sane frontends like XSane or scanimage are just "ordinary" user space programs, and the scanner specific backends are ordinary libraries linked to the frontends. While a frontend or a backend may contain bugs cuasing segfault or garbled images, it is highly unlikely that a user program itself can freeze a Linux box as you are experiencing. This is the reason that I suspect either a hardware failure -- or you hit perhaps a kernel bug. One noticeable difference between most programs accessing CD drives/writers and Sane backend for SCSI scanners is that Sane uses comparatively large data sizes in its SCSI commands (typically 128 kB for READ commands), while CD writing software uses probably data block sizes < 32 kB. It could be that these larger data block sizes are somehow related with your bug. (though they are not the cause, I think - Sane uses these block sizes since several years without any problem) You could try to reduce the block size by setting "option scsi-buffer-size-min" and "option scsi-buffer-size-max" to values like 16384 or 32768. Abel