There is a difference between "not detecting" a piece of hardware (scanner
in your case) and "not having drivers" for the hardware. If the hardware is
detected, you should get a popup about looking for drivers, and possibly a
request to point to the drivers, such as on the manufacturer's CD, or
somewhere on the hard drive. If so, provide drivers from the manufacturer,
or try XP update and hope it finds some.
But, if you get NO response at all from XP when you attach the scanner
(assuming it is USB), then that is a different sort of problem. You might
try the detect new hardware feature of XP, run from the device manager.
Also, check to see whether the scanner already appears in the device
manager. If it does, try the uninstall option before you try the detect new
hardware option.
The device manager is accessed from MyComputer, right-click, properties,
hardware, device manager.
Note that scanner detection and drivers are not all that is required to make
a scanner work. In the case of my HP 6200 scanner, although XP came with
the drivers, I had to download a nearly 50 Meg file of software to make the
scanner work.
Finally, or maybe first, check the obvious, like power to the scanner and
USB cables. If you have another working USB deivce (e.g., camera,
trackball, flash drive), test the USB port by pluging that in in place of
the scanner.
