Help!! Half of my disk capacity can't be used!!

[Fulham Fallout]

My ipod (3rd Gen 40GB monochrome) is giving me a world of pain. It froze and emitted a clicking sound continually. Resetting gave the 'sad ipod' icon. Every attempt to power up resulted in more clicking or whirring followed by the sad ipod icon or the folder icon. I-tunes or the updater wouldn't recognize it. I partly fixed it by banging it quite hard on my knee which I assume freed up the hard disk head or whatever was clicking. It worked fine for an hour or so and then started track skipping and clicking again. I-tunes reported an error with the disk that required restoring back to factory settings, so I did this. I also downloaded the latest versions of itunes and ipod software.

Now THIS is the problem : I can happily upload tracks from my library onto the restored/cleaned hard drive until I get to just over 5000 tracks (about 18GB). When I go further, the upload freezes and eventually I get a 'writing to drive K' error (K is the drive name my PC has assigned to the ipod). Then when I disconnect from the computer, there's a high chance that ALL of the music has disappeared from the ipod and you have to repeat the restore/upload cycle again. I think I did it 3 times before I noticed that it was crashing at roughly the same place every time.

So my ipod is working at roughly half capacity, which I'm cheesed off about. Any ideas what's wrong - is half of the hard drive corrupt? If so, why doesn't restoring sort this out? Anyone else seen this?

[lucky168]

Do a scandisk in Win XP.
You probably find it has bad sectors.

[DC12112]

I had the same thing happen to one of my iPods. I turned out to be a bad hard drive. But it was the same thing it would only load about Half of my music. When it first happend I thought it was the song and i didn't like it. I was guessing that it didn't like Led Zeppelin. But its the hard drive.

[Fulham Fallout]

Thanks for these replies. I will do the scandisk thing - is there any way to repair bad sectors if I find any?

Alternatively, can you get replacement hard-drives installed? Any idea how much this would cost? And who does it?