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Moving to Linux: Kiss the Blue Screen of Death Goodbye!

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Uncovering the HP 1000 Mini Photo Scanner

When I bought my new notebook (Presario 2570), Staples bundled a 'free gift' with it, a little HP 1000 photo scanner (retails for about $60). Anyhow, it was still sealed in the package and had been for about a month when I finally decided to look at it. I was cleaning up (a tiny bit) around my desk when I re-found the little unit.

All I found in the package was the scanner itself and a USB patch cable -- no additional power cable of any kind. I plugged it in, slid a picture on the scanner bed (just big enough for a 4x6 picture), and pressed the little scan button. After a little whirring, nothing else happened. So, I opened up a shell, typed "dmesg" and saw this little bit of information.

     Initializing USB Mass Storage driver...
     usb.c: registered new driver usb-storage
     scsi1 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
       Vendor: HP        Model: Photo scanner     Rev: 0001
       Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 02
     Attached scsi removable disk sda at scsi1, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
     SCSI device sda: 32768 512-byte hdwr sectors (17 MB)
     sda: Write Protect is off
      sda:

Fascinating. Looked like nothing more than a fancy USB key (or other storage media) with apparently, 17 Meg of storage capacity. I then tried the following.

   mkdir /mnt/hp1000
   mount -t vfat /dev/sda /mnt/hp1000

That worked just fine (I chose vfat because I figure it was likely a Windows file system on the unit). So I did an "ls /mnt/hp1000" and saw a file called scan01.jpg sitting there which I then just copied into a directory where I keep photographs. From there, I could then Gimp it or edit it to my heart's content. Cool, eh?

The whole point of this story is that it can be fun to figure out how it could be used without any documentation whatsoever. Once you start to become comfortable with your Linux system's shell and its commands, anything is possible.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled Linux work.