Is the hard drive in my iPod dead?

[Quiksilver]

Alright so recently my iPod classic (160GB) is acting funky. After syncing my iPod with iTunes the music synced onto the iPod will not play correctly. I can select and some artist albums and try to play it and it will skip over several songs before it starts to play and others play perfectly fine. Now no matter what I try to sync the iPod it will say No Music, No Albums, Etc. despite data space being used on it. I've tried restoring my using iTunes and doing a complete reformat of it manually and it still does the same thing.

I've pulled up the diag. menu to read the smart data and is says:

Retracts: 41
Reallocs: 16376
Pending Sectors: 0
PowerOn Hours: 348
Start/Stops: 49171
Temp (Current): 32C
Temp (Min): 5c
Temp (Max): 52C

From what I gathered by googling, high start/stops and rellocs can mean hard drive is on its way out, so does my issue sound like that is what is happening?

Now at the moment I'm in the middle of doing a reformat again using command prompt to see if that will help at all (wasn't doing it this way before)

 

[vailr]

Can you set it to USB drive mode & connect it to a Windows PC via USB?
Then you could run CHKDSK z:/f (z=whatever drive letter Windows assigns) & see if that fixes it.
Additionally, you could try running Spinrite (grc.com) on the drive.
Or: if you have a Mac, try Disc Utility's repair functions.

 

[Quiksilver]

I didn't think of trying CHKDISK. Gonna try it now.

 

[Quiksilver]

CHKDSK comes up as clean... and Spinrite is ridiculous for $90 bones it ain't worth it. Looks like Im gonna have to make a trip up to apple store and see what the can do.