Yesterday while walking to class my iPod locked-up. When I reset it things looked ok until I tried to play a song. Then it locked up again. Ok, so I assume that the hard drive had crashed and that I would need to spend at the very least $160 for another Toshiba hard drive of questionable quality. The most unnerving thing was that while I was in the iPod's diagnostic menu, the status of the hard drive showed that it had 25 hours of running tie logged. I was not a happy camper.

Then I stumbled across this article: Lowendmac iPod Drive Failure
There he talks about how the connector on the logic board comes loose and causes the same symptoms as a crashed hard drive.

Being the cheap guy I am 😉 It took me all of 2 seconds to decide to open my iPod and have a look around. After all I've been out of warranty since last March anyways. It turns out that the connector on the logic board wasn't the problem. It was the one on the drive.
It was just hanging off enough to confuse the system and it's thin strip of tape had come completely off. A little high-temperature electrical tape and things were back to normal again! And it didn't cost me a thing!! 😀