How to fix an iPod Classic with a bad hard drive?

I've an iPod Classic 160 GB bought in 2007.

I've never had problems copying songs into it, through iTunes, but from the beginning I never had much success using it as a portable hard drive. Whenever I tried copying large files, or many files, into it, it would hang and reboot after a while.

The same happens when I tried copying videos into it, also through iTunes, to the extension that iTunes complains that it can't read or write to the iPod.

Usually, restoring the iPod returns it to the state that I can copy songs again, but when I increase the usage to videos or large files the trouble starts again.

I'm pretty convinced it has a bad hard drive, but it is not covered by warranty anymore. Fixing it at a local Apple representative would cost as much as buying a new one, and the ifixit howto is pretty much discouraging, besides stating that video iPod use special hard drives and they don't sell them anymore.

I was hoping that mounting the iPod in disk mode and running a check disk would mark the bad sectors and allow me use it as a <160GB iPod, but I can't find what tool would do that on the Mac.

What do you recommend? How should I proceed?

You can try to diagnose if the disk has a problem with the diagnostic mode.

To enter the diagnostic mode, press the folowing key for 5 seconds when the apple logo appears after a reset :

"back"
"select"

In the diagnotic mode, you can navigate in the menus with the back/next keys and launch a bunch of test, inluding hard drive tests.

If the tests shows a disk problem, the solution is to change the disk. Buying a second-hand ipod disk from someone who breack his screen won't normaly be very expensive.