If your iPod's HD is toast you can have it replaced with a new one for a very reasonable price. go here:
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www.digiexpress.us/This place has an A1 rating they have a flat fee $25 dollars plus parts repair service. They have all of the parts for the classic. The 80 gig HD is $99.00 dollars. I believe they can upgrade you classic to a 160 gig HD if you want. A new iPod Classic is $249.00 dollars so you can decide if it is worth fixing what you have.
By the way if you do get it going or repaired I would suggest you go to »
www.rockbox.org/ They have a real nifty OS for the Classic that vastly improves the functionality of the iPod Classic. The nice thing about it is does not disable your Apple OS instead you end up with a dual boot system. I have run their OS on an old Sansa unit for years and it transformed it into a much, much better player. It will give your iPod the ablity to play codex's such as Ogg, Flac, and others. The graphic equalizer it has is almost like a mini recording studio's equalizer board.