HP Digital Sender (Scanner) 9100C - hard drive failure: repaired

We have an HP Digital Sender 9100C which we use frequently. It's an awesome scanner with a built-in document feeder and various network capabilities. We've had it from new, back in 2003/4 and although its had the occasional hiccup, it has never had any serious issues.

Here is a video of someone's 9100C in action:

And then last week it packed up. I found the self-test function and the results indicated a failed hard drive. I decided to fix it. My first thought was to simply stick a new (IDE) hard drive in there. However, after a bit of research I realised that it was a bit more complicated than that. This is because the 9100C has its own operating system which lives on the hard drive. Since the old hard drive was basically ruined, there was no prospect of recovering any data or an image from it. A bit more research lead me to the Pariswells website and a blog post on replacing the hard drive in the 9100C. Perhaps more helpfully, there is also a link to an "img" file which contains the operating system needed. I think its fair to say that but for that blog post, our scanner would be in bits right now, being sold for spares.

So, why this post? Well, having now fixed our 9100C, I thought I'd update the instructions for doing the repair as the information on the Pariswells website isn't quite complete (or, at least, doesn't cover the setup I was using to write the HP image to the replacement drive).

1. Download the HP image file using the link on the Pariswells website. Extract the image into a folder on your PC.

** if the links on Pariswells ever stop working, drop me a line and I'll sort something out for you **

2. Attach the replacement IDE hard drive to your PC or laptop. Since I was using a laptop, I used a IDE to USB converter which worked, but the result was that the hard drive was represented as a USB drive rather than a component of my system. This was an arrangement that the "SelfImage" software from the Pariswells site did not like at all.

3. Wipe the replacement hard drive (if its not new), and delete all partitions on it. Make a new 40GB partition formatted as NTFS. I used Aomei Partition Assistant for this.

4. Download and install USB Image Tool. This is a little program that would normally be used to backup an image from a USB stick. It can also write an image to a USB stick using its restore function.

5. Run USB Image Tool, In "Options" check the "Show non-removable devices (USB hard disk drives)" option. The hard drive's 40GB partition should appear on the left hand side. Select it, then click "Restore". Find the HP image file and select it.

6. Sit back and wait for the image to be written (my set-up took about 45 minutes).

7. Once done, go into File Explorer on your computer. There should be three extra partitions. There will be a few folders in each one, if you fancy having a nosy. The new partitions are small and are now in FAT format (rather than NTFS).

8. "Eject" the drive and then install it in the 9100C. Refit all the cables and wires, etc.

At this stage, I actually didn't have to do anything beyond switching the 9100C on. No initial configuration was needed to get it on my network. I used the HP web based interface (just type the IP address of the 9100C into a browser) to fine tune the settings. First access requires a login and password. The login is "Administrator". The password field should be left blank. Remake your address book if, like me, you haven't kept a backup of it...

Easy :)

More soon, no doubt....


D