"sad ipod" nano bricked?

[albinoblackrabbit]

I was given a "broken" ipod nano (1G) about 4 months ago. Apparently it had just "died". I plugged it into a computer where it kept restarting. I held select+menu and it booted and worked fine. A few days ago it gave me the "Use iTunes to restore" message. After restoring a few times (the message kept coming back) it gave me the sad ipod and i can't do diagnostics or enter disk mode. Is this a permanant brick? I would like to get this working again because my other ipod (5g) is also broken

[Chronon]

Inability to enter either disk mode or diagnostic mode does sound like a hardware problem to me.  I don't have any good suggestions, unfortunately.

[albinoblackrabbit]

What bit of the hardware is likely be broken then? I did read at http://forums.ilounge.com/showthread.php?s=2fd6c696b3b1d492f1096f35f55d65b5&threadid=93059&highlight=fdisk that the sad ipod can be caused by a a loss of partitions but i am a bit scared to try his method in case I loose my data!

[LambdaCalculus]

It could be either loss of partitions, or (worse) a sign that the flash storage may be dying.

At this point, you may not have much else to lose. Try fdisk to see if you can repair the partition map, and then restore. It's worth a shot, if for nothing more than to prove what's wrong.

[Chronon]

Won't using fdisk require getting into disk mode somehow? 

I thought something might be wrong with the flash ROM since the OP's inability to access disk mode or diagnostic mode.  However, as far as I know, the sad icon originates from code stored in the same place.  Maybe buttons are the culprit instead?

[LambdaCalculus]

Possibly. Right now, I'm think there's a hardware problem somewhere, but I can't quite place exactly what piece of hardware is the culprit.

[albinoblackrabbit]

I am going to try to fdisk off my linux mint 7 KDE dvd today, if that fails will it mean it is a definate hardware failure?

[GodEater]

If you can't get the ipod to go into disk mode, you won't be able to use fdisk on it.