Hard Drive (Anyone, please help!)

Question

Well, I've had this ipod since may of '05, and it's been working great up until its last few months. First few months before it died it kept freezinf up and what not, and finally, whenever tha apple figure comes up in the screen, the sad face exclamation follows right after. As I tired connecting this through the power supply, it just kept going through the same cycle, BUT with one little exception, when the sad face goes away, a battery with an excalamation comes up, so I took it into account that it might be a battery problem. So after numerous weeks of waiting, I tried to set up an appointment online for the Apple Store, and long and behold they are booked every day from before the holidays, to this day. So I took matters into my own hands with an e xperienced friend, and replaced the battery. Long and behold THAT didnt work either BUT, when we were in the process of installing the battery, we took the hard drive out, and we realized there was something shaking inside. This we thought wasn't a good sign knowing that a heard drive should be solid as a rock and have no lose parts. So now I'm sitting here, thinking of buying a 30GB hardrive off eBay, and just put that in, instead of taking it to the Apple store which has no room for reservations. Although, this is why I came here. Can anybody tell me if there's a nother variable that I might be missing, and can I go through just upgrading my hard drive to something even more spacious for a a very little amount of money?
Here's a link for the hard drive for anyone who's wondering what it really is: http://cgi.ebay.com/Apple-Ipod-30GB-Hard-Drive-Toshiba-MK3004GAH-AS-IS_W0QQitemZ 180074688075QQihZ008QQcategoryZ73837QQcmdZViewIt
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It would be greatly appreciated if you can send me your answers to my e-mail, because I'm new to the discussion form. Here it is: [email protected]
But if that doesn't work, you can always respond to me here. I'd probably get it eventually. Thank you for your time.
Dell Dimension 4700   Windows XP   It's a PC.

Answer 1

That's the way.
The drive is probably formatted NTFS which is Windows proprietary file system. Mac OS can read it, but not write to it.
You can do as suggested by TheDave if you have sufficient HD space for temporary storage. Depending on whether you need to continue using the drive with Windows machines there are a few options.
Best for Mac only use is to re-partition and format as GUID partition map and Mac OS Extended (journaled)
For dual use, Leave the partition as MBR and format as FAT32 (MS-DOS in Disk Utility). This has a file size limit of a little over 4GB, but can be read and written to by both Mac and Windows.
There is also exFAT (aka FAT64) if both OSs support it - no file limit there that you'll ever reach.
Alternatively there are software solutions which will allow the Mac to read and write to NTFS drives. I'm told they're not as good as the other solutions, but may be an option if you haven't space to store the contents while re-formatting.