Background:

My wife’s 20Gb 4G failed the other day. It would only show the “sad ipod?icon. It would not mount as a drive on a PC nor would it enter the diagnostics mode. The lad at the apple store informed us that the unit was bricked and had likely suffered a catastrophic drive failure or worse. He offered us 10% off a new unit under the Apple recycle program. I decided that I could get more than $20 worth of fun playing with a dead ipod and declined his generous offer.

I brought the brick home and popped it open. I reseated the hard drive connectors and put it back together and the unit booted up just fine. When I ran the diagnostics, everything passed except the HDD SCAN. From this result I concluded that the unit had indeed suffered a head crash. So I reformatted the drive on my PC. The format identified ~68kb of bad sectors. I then did a Restore in iTunes. Everything seems fine except that it still fails the HDD SCAN diagnostic.

I have concluded that the HDD SCAN diagnostic probably scans all drive sectors without regard to whether they have been flagged as bad by the FAT32 format operation, so I am not overly concerned about the continued failure of that diagnostic. However my experience has been that once a drive starts showing bad sectors it is simply a matter of time until complete failure ensues. So now is the time to research “plan B.?br />
My Question:

Plan B is to replace the hard drive, maybe even with a larger capacity. I have found many articles that describe the process, but nobody seems to have had 100% success. Since a new drive costs only ~$100, this is a much more cost effective solution than getting a new ipod or having Apple replace the drive. So now some questions for the forum:

Q1: Is there a known article that documents a successful DIY hard drive replacement on an ipod?

My specific concern:
If a slap in a new drive, I am concerned about the 39Mb HFS+ partition. I don’t have access to a mac to create such a partition.

Q2a: Can I simply format a new drive as FAT32 and expect the iTunes Restore function to modify the partitions and add the HFS+ information?

Q2b: Should I partition the drive and leave the 39Mb partition unallocated and then expect that a Restore will handle things?


I appreciate any guidance that your folks may be able to offer.

D
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