I believe the hard drive could be going bad. I have a 30 GB ipod, the same gen as yours and the hard drive is working but there are some bad sectors at the beginning of the disk that cause the ipod to freeze or the play counter not advancing (some times I hear distorted sound through the headphones). I found the bad sectors doing a "surface test" using EaseUS partition manager, but I believe there is some free software available for that. You also can boot your ipod in "diagnostic mode". See here: http://www.methodshop.com/gadgets/ipodsu... Go to IO>Hard Drive>HDSMARTData Now you'll get these values: Retracts Reallocs Pending sectors Power on hours Start/stops Reallocs is the number of bad sectors that have been and reallocated to the spare area. Pending sectors is the number of bad sectors pending from being reallocated to the spare area. In my case bad sectors show always in the same area no matter how many times I format and restore the hard drive, so I created a 1 GB dummy file (the approximate size of...
Which ribbon cable are you talking about? For the hard drive? Click wheel maybe? If the logic board doesn't have a socket with a clip maybe it was soldered directly to the pads? A picture would be helpful. Sorry for my terrible English.
As far as I know, you only have to sync the ipod with itunes in a Mac and restore it from there. Itunes will download the correct firmware for your device and restore it. It will be formatted as HFS+.
