Here's my tale of woe, I hope one of you kind folk can point me in the right direction.

I received a 3G 20GB Ipod as a gift a few years ago. Recently it began having difficulty w/ its hard drive. It was purchased at Best Buy and an "extended" warranty was purchased as well. I took it to Best Buy once, they claimed repaired but when returned it still had issues. The second time I took it in they claimed to replace the HD.

Now here is where my problems begin. I attempted to connect it to my Mac Mini and the ipod is not recognized by the system. The Disk Repair utility will see it but neither the Ipod updater restore nor the disk repair program are able to fix the drive. The error keeps coming back as unknown and mentions a problem w/ the partition.

I took it to my local Apple store where the "genius bar" tech checked it out w/ both my firewire cable and one from her store. She too encountered the problems trying to restore the drive using either the ipod updater restore feature or the disk repair to erase the drive.

I then proceeded back to Best Buy. I informed them of the problem, what had been done and asked them to address the issue. The "geek squad" tech went into the back and connedted my ipod to a windows PC using USB 2.0. He successfully added songs to the ipod and claims to have updated it to the latest setting (2.3) using the ipod updater.

However, upon returning home I found, again, that my Mac Mini was unable to see the drive except in Disk Repair. I've made multiple attempts to restore/update the drive using the Ipod updater. I attempted to erase the drive in every format offered by the Disk Repair including running a deep "zero all data" erase in every mode possible. I also attempted to erase the drive by formating it on my Windows PC which also failed. I then attempted to change the partitions on the Mac Mini which also failed. I've searched the Ilounge forums as well as the Apple support forums and followeded every article I could find on the matter which pretty much described all of the above.

Please, please if you have any thoughts please help.

Many thanks in advance.
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