Drum hours stuck at 9999

[Revmuddy]

I just got an Alesis XT-20 on Ebay that's supposed to have less than 20 hours on it...But when I press "set locate" and "stop" it says 9999 and after I used it all night it STILL says "9999" It looks BRAND NEW, with NO wear on the control buttons and not a scratch anywhere! Anybody got a clue??

[Blue Bear Sound]

Either there's a problem with the electronics, or that machine is not actually new and someone lied to you......

[vbass]

This display means that at some point the main board lost power from it's back-up battery. It doesn't necessarily mean there is a big problem. However, you can not reset the head hours. This can only be done by an ADAT tech that has a special eprom for this purpose. The unit will not count head hours until this is done. Units that went to the factory with this problem would have the head hours reset according the number of errors that were being written to tape while in record mode, a guess was made based on the number of errors being written to tape. Format a fresh tape and then look at the number of errors(check the manual), if you see 1 or two every few seconds you are probably in good shape. Anything consistantly higher than 20 or 30 I would be worried about.