Desperately need help with Nikon negatives scanner

Damian.Byrne · May 4, 2017

Hello peeps, I really need help with this one please.

As you can see in the picture, the device in question is a Nikon Super Coolscan 8000 ED. It's a scanner for photo negatives. It connects via firewire cable to my dad's computer, which is a bog standard Dell running Windows 7 Home Premium x64 (2600K, 4GB RAM, Geforce GT 530). He only ever uses that computer for scanning in his photos, it's not even connected to the Internet.

The other day, he says, he was running his scanning program (Nikon Scan 4.0.3, for Vista 32-bit, I'll get to that in a minute), and had a bunch of photos scanned. However, the program started failing to respond, and he closed it. When he re-opened, the program stopped functioning correctly.

According to dad, when you put in a tray of negatives, Nikon Scan is supposed to show 4 thumbnails in a corner, something to do with splitting up the photos into separate ones. Clicking the buttons marked "Preview" and "Scan" in the program don't do what he needs, they only scan one photo.

So, I ring up my bro, and he gives me a link to some instructions on what to do in this situation. This problem has occured before, and I remember last time, we were able to fix it, and dad was able to scan his photos. Here's the link

http://www.sevenforums.com/drivers/44994-getting-your-nikon-coolscan-work-w7-x64.html

I follow the instructions to a T, including restarting after uninstall and re-install, only it doesn't work.

Now all of a sudden, for reasons completely unknown to me, when I go into Device Manager, find the scanner and tell it to install the driver according to the above instructions, the scanner disappears completely from Device Manager. "Scan for Hardware Changes" does nothing. Unplugging the firewire cable and putting it back in does nothing. Restarting does nothing. Nikon Scan says it can't find any active devices. Basically, as far as the computer is concerned, there is no scanner connected to it, even though there actually is.

Dad is pissed off at this, because the scanner costs 8,000 euro (although a glance at ebay shows one going for less than a thousand).

Any ideas peeps?