recently bought a 404 and the previous owner said he was updating the device and he shutit off/removed the card(something along those lines, i'll clarify soon) now when I turn it on it just displays "SP-404" is this a software issue? none of the pads are lighting up, he said it was working fine up until that 'incident'. any help is appreciated, if i was to vague let me know

Do a factory reset. You can download the manual and factory data for the card from Roland's site. The factory reset should override any possible harm he might have done while updating the firmware.

i tried a factory reset but nothing is happening. none of the pads are lighting up. i downloaded the 1.05 update but there isnt anything on the cf card and roland is telling me to put the update into the root folder.
edit: loaded factory data, reattemptd reset - didnt work. : (

To be honest that sounds bad, if you got it cheap it might be repairable by Roland if it;s a fried board or chip and still be "wurth" it(yes I can spell I'm drunk you bitches!). Otherwise you might have been deceived by an unscrupulous seller...there's more born than we can even count! Worst comes to worst you learn a lesson on taking people's word for granted and you have extra parts for your next SP sampler. Keep smiling and life will send you something

I don't think anything got fried. You run the risk of bricking any electronic device with onboard OS if you interrupt flashing it with newer firmware...

Most devices have some sort of 'back door' to unbrick the unit, but not as many nerds hack the 404, sooo...I'd say ask Roland. They'd probably open it up and hook up a computer to some jack inside and write the firmware using computer to fix it.

I concur^ I wish I cared about code, then I would like to hack all the SP samplers...but it seems very tedious and boring. It would be nice to add the resample with ext. source on 404/404sx like the 303 has, which I would guess is a software difference rather than a hardware restriction/limitation.

I remember reading somewhere that if you want to update the 404
you have to copy the file to the CF card with Windows computer. OS X
won't work. I'm not sure about this though.