My cat chewed on the Nikon Coolscan V ED slide scanner's USB cable. When she was young, she had an appetite for motherboards, and she ruined one. So much for some background information.
After the scanner would not be recognized anymore by the computer, I called Nikon Support in The Netherlands, and they told me that they could not supply the cable. There was none left. No effort to find one. No help tracing one. They basically said 'dump the scanner'.
I am loaded with Nikon camera's (analogue & digital) but an incident like this makes me move towards Canon.
Luckily Amazon UK had the cable available.