Constant restart and "clicking" sound with the apple logo reappearing.

Question

my iPod(80 GB) is stuck on the apple logo screen and it keeps shutting off and starting up and shutting off.. so on and so forth. I tried restoring it when i connect it to my computer but it won't get past the actual restore part. It gets all the way through the "extracting software" step and then once it hits the "restore" step it stops about half way through it and says an unknown error has occured(1439) or something like that. I looked that up and it says to try a bunch of different things and i've tried them all and nothing seems to work, not even putting it into disk mode. And once i take it out of Disk Mode a black screen with a white apple logo pops up like it wants to restore or whatever and that loads about 3/4 of the way and then goes right back to the grey screen with the apple logo and continues to go on and off. If anyone has any suggestions let me know because I'm to the point where I will launch this thing at a wall. It's SOO frustrating.

Answer 1

oh... didn't realize you also had a 'corrupt ipod' message.. so far i've been spared that one.
On an early ipod i had that message regularly after a couple of years, and it only went away when i did what i was about to do now: format the thing in mac, then go back and reformat it in Windows. I've no idea at all why that worked,or even whether it "should" work, but, with an old model it did. That particular ipod originally started malfunctioning, i think, due to my own carelessness - i'd left in on the dashboard of my van for a whole day in the sun of a very hot summer. I don't think anything electronic is over-fond of that kind of treatment... whatever, the corruption got cured but the battery gave up not very long after.
Otherwise, i know we're dealing with XP here, not Vista, but a couple of interesting articles on a Windows blog may have a degree of relevance:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=536
and the follow-up
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=543&tag=rbxccnbzd1
i guess i know what you mean about never using apple products again.. I haven't got that far, and don't really expect to, but I said it several times, not always entirely fairly, about Microsoft, when forced to work in nothing but Windows (I've preferred Mac as a basic system for about as long as I can remember...). Seems like Apple, now that they're selling more stuff, are doing what is often so irritating about Microsoft - rushing new stuff out with plenty of wonderful features and selling points but inadequate practical testing...