hi, my friend asked me to look at his ipod video 80g, it showed a sad face with apple/support error message, also the hdd made a 'clicking' sound, i read that its a faulty hdd, plus it comes up often saying 'please wait, very low battery' and doesn't show anything but the screen and a type of loading icon. please bear in mind that i dont thinks the battery is dead, if i stick it in recovery mode on pc it shows do not disconnect and stays on the screen (doesn't show any charging just full battery). so i buy another hdd, install it, and when i turn on the ipod i get the same problem, only i cant even hear the drive spin up. (i was very very carefull with ribbon) when i put it into recovery mode, the computer does not see it and neither does itunes, only thing it shows up in is device manager under disk drives as something like 'apple usb device' some people say i have to format new drive but i cant cos it wont show up on computer, and sometimes (not always) it keeps rebooting. someone please help its doing my head in lol.
some people are idiots! I suspect, it is dead. How could you format it? itunes most likely has a proprietary format. Formatting it with a computer should ruin it. They come formatted. Even formatting Chipods which should be OK to do, usually kills them. Swapping out the HD was a good idea it sounds like that was the problem but maybe it was a bigger problem than you thought. The recovery mode will format the HD; that is how you format them properly. Could your battery be dead? They are about 8 USDs. It might have been the battery all along. Your ipod gets current directly from the battery. If it is really dead your ipod will not get power even if it is plugged in. Good luck!
