iPod's hdd is dieing

[webber2k]

Please choose the appropriate forum for this topic. Thank you. hello all ya ipod lovers

i've recently bought an used 15G ipod, i've initialy formated it under win fat32, used it for a mount without any problems, but a few days ago the horror:
the hdd developped bad sector (i think becouse of disconnecting without using window's safely remove hardware)
i used hdd regenerator v1.22 under win98 and was able to repair a few of the bad sectors(it took more than a day), but many remained.
i used win98's scandisk with through option and after more than a day of waiting (did not complete), it had marked more than 2mb of bad secotrs.
from hdd regenerator i could see that these bad sectors are located in the begining 2gb of the drive.
any writing or reading from this section is almost imposible (win98 returns write error, winxp returns a blu screen and restarts). ipod skips songs, starts with dificulty etc.
my question is can i repartition the drive to leave the 2gb free, and if so with what software? i tried partitionmagic8 but it won't detect the ipod as a drive under win98 or winxp.
please help. i've became addicted to my ipod. can't go on without it.
thanks.

[IlIlIlIlIl]

have you tried to restore the hard drive?

[EvilDude]

Unfortunately the first 40mb are for Apple's OS, you cannot partition it yourself either as iPod will not detect it. It only works with the partitions that it's made to read... might have luck with the linux kernel tho.

[webber2k]

i've managed to resize the fat32 partition , and freed up the bad 2gb with an very old msdos program wich didn't recognized the mac partition but was able to modify the fat partition.
i now only have about 11,7gb of disk space but it works as smooth as new.
thanks 4 the adices.
have any ideea if i can get those bad sectors fixed, or i should just be happy it works?
many thanks 2 iPodlounge, you forum helped me understand how the iPod works an was able 2 fix the problem myself.

if anyone is looking 4 that ms dos program( i dont know its name, it doesn't say ?) i'll be more than happy to mail it 2 u (it's less than 2mb)
cipnt@yahoo.com