3G iPod Hard Drive Issues

[heyheyitsdavid]

Please choose the appropriate forum for this topic. Thank you. Please choose the appropriate forum for this topic. Thank you. Please choose the appropriate forum for this topic. Thank you. I have a 3rd Generation iPod that has been giving me all kinds of problems as of late. Here's the low down:

1) Sometimes when waking my iPod up it would show the Apple logo and never boot. If I reset it enough times, forced disk mode, or at the worst restored it with the iPod updater, it would be fine again.

2) Last week this happened and I messed with it for a few hours and finally got it to work after formatting the drive from a DOS promt and then restored it with the updater. (Note: I was able to put linux, from ipodlinux[can't post full url, not "established member"], on my iPod prior to the format and it would boot about 75% of the time into linux, but not Apple's iPod software.)

3) The problem came back a couple of days ago and I have not had any luck getting to work again using all of the methods described above. (Though linux will still work.)

4. I have came to the assumption that I have a bad sector on my hard disk that is keeping it from booting properly. I decided this is the problem because 9/10 times I restore/update the iPod it will not create the "Device" folder inside "iPod_Control". I have the files from this saved onto my computer and have tried copying them to the drive and then booting the iPod, but this does no good. I've also tried editing the version number in this file so that the Updater will let me "Update" it to the latest frimware (which is really already there, I'm just trying to trick the software), when I do this, it also doesn't write to the "sysinfo" file 9/10 times.

5. I assume the reason it won't boot when I simply copy the old working files over is that the iPod doesn't use the FAT table to find the file, it looks in a certain sector where that file is always supposed to reside...though this is only a guess.

6. Does anyone have any ideas of how to fix this other than buying a new drive/iPod? (I'm really not in a position to buy a new one, I'm a college student, and the end of the school year is my brokest time of year =) Perhaps someone has some software out there that will allow me to force my iPod to look elsewhere for the boot information. I haven't had any luck finding any if it does exist.

7. I have also booted the iPod into "Diagnostic Mode", and it fails the HDD scan at sector 0x59 (189 in decimal) everytime.

8. Using linux instead of Apple's iPod software, while it does seem like a good idea, doesn't really work as the audio decoder on there isn't so fabulous and skips on every song I've tried it on thus far (it claims that it has problems with higher bit-rate files)

Thanks for any help or guidance,
David Bowker

[heyheyitsdavid]

Well, I got the problem fixed for a little while after many runs of the restore/reboot process. Now it seems as if my hard drive is dead forever...so, I was hoping that perhaps someone knew of a good, reliable, moderately priced place to purchase 3rd & 4th Generation Hard Disks (preferably 30gb+). Any information would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
David Bowker
ddbowker@gmail.com