Major Drama...5G 60GB Video dismounting, not charging, corrupt & more!

Question

Here is my situation. This is long, sorry in advance . I hope someone here has some insight.
As stated in the title I have a 5G 60 GB video ipod. I got it in March of 2006 when it was the replacement under warranty for my non-serviceable crashed 4G.
It has been in for several repairs under my extended warranty. First control wheel and headphone jack last May. Then hard drive crash (sadface error) in July 08. After I got it back that time, although in good working order it occasionally began dismounting itself from my computer. It was a pain because it still showed "Do not Disconnect" but would not be found in iTunes. So I would use the windows "safely remove hardware" function to remove it and then replug it and it would mount. It did this more and more frequently as time went on and sometime in Oct/Nov 08 I began getting the error message "Scan and fix Jen's ipod F". I looked it up and supposedly it is just a Vista glitch so I didn't worry about it.
It still worked OK so I did not take it in for repair over these minor issues. On Jan 31 09 the battery finally went, it would no longer hold a charge.
I took it in for repair and the battery was replaced. It took a while to get it back and I just got it back last Sunday March 1.
The day I got it back, I plugged it into the computer and after letting it charge for about 10 hours, began the work of manually transferring over my library. (I use disk mode and prefer to do this manually instead of just synching) I managed to transfer about 2K songs (IIRC about 15 GB) at this time and took it to work Monday. It was, of course, fully charged.
At work that day, I listened to music for about 6 hours. It worked fine, although the battery drained faster than usual (normally I get from 12-16 hours of use -music- before needing to charge). When the indicator got to red, I plugged it into the wall adapter for while. After about 1/2 hr the battery had not seemed to charge at all. I tried a different wall plug, no change.
At home I set it into my radio/ipod dock and after 5 hours it had not charged any in that device either. Finally I plugged it in to my computer via my USB and still nothing.
At this point I pretty much figured my new battery is defective, however a couple of days later I decided to troubleshoot a little deeper. I uninstalled/reinstalled the newest version of iTunes 8.02.20 on both my laptops. This time when I mounted it, it really wigged out. Since the battery was still going (but not charging) I tried transferring several songs over to see if that would work.
Right away it froze up. I tried to disconnect and of course no dice so I tried through Windows and got this message " Windows cannot stop your Apple ipod USB device because a program is still using it. Close any programs that might be using it and try again" So I close iTunes. Immediately before I can try to disconnect it, iTunes comes back up again, as it is obviously trying to mount. But when it does, on the summary page where it shows the picture and details of my device, it is instead showing a picture of an old, white click wheel ipod and not my black 5G. Also it does not say :"Jen's ipod" in the list it just says "ipod"...so when I click on it I get this lovely gem: " Itunes has detected an ipod that appears to be corrupted. You may need to Restore this ipod before it can be used with iTunes. You may also try disconnecting and reconnecting the ipod". Ugh. So I tried to disconnect via windows and it worked. I reconnected it, like the error message said to do and again it came up as the phantom click wheel ipod. I clicked on it and got the corrupt message again, so this time I tried to Restore it. As soon as I clicked Restore button iTunes froze and I had to use Task Manager to shut it down.
I loaded iTunes again and reconnected it in another attempt to Restore it, but this is the error message I got this time; "USB device is not recognized. One of the devices attached to this computer has malfunctioned and Windows does not recognize it". THEN the ipod starts beeping and it says the dreaded "Please wait....very low battery" ( I have started reading that thread but haven't got too far in it yet.
So basically my question(s) is this: Is all of this mess related to the (apparently) defective battery that was installed? Could it be a software issue? When I took it in for service I was strongly cautioned that software issues are not covered (and my warranty expires next Tuesday).. I was cautioned about this very emphatically....so much so I wondered if they knew something I did not. What exactly is corrupt? Is it the hard drive or is there a corrupt file or driver somewhere? Was mny batter issue possibly caused my the dismounting problem I was having??
Oh, I do know that it is not an issue with iTunes, my USB ports, my dock, or my wall adapter, or both of my laptops as my husband's 30GB 5G video still works fine and has had absolutely no issues (his never has).
Any insight or advice anyone could give me would be sincerely appreciated.
THANKS! Jen

Answer 1

I have one isea that might work...
Here are the steps:
1)Do a hard reset (menu + select)
2)Before it turns back on quickly press (select + play)
3)This should put the iPod into disk mode
4)plug the ipod into the computer
5)if iTunes doesnt open, open it
6)you should now be able to restore it
Hope this fixes your problem!