Nothing works on iPod, I think my hard drive is shot on my 120g classic. Help?

Question

Okay, so I purchased the iPod at Target in April of 2010. I didn't save the receipt or buy any sort of warranty plan or anything because I didn't anticipate any problems and frankly didn't have the cash. I also never registered the iPod with Apple or anything like that. I know this was a bad plan. But anyway, about 4 months after using the iPod it started getting...screwy. Some songs lost their album artwork or some of the album artworks got switched, for example Radiohead songs all had Killers album covers and Pink album covers instead of their originals. It was weird but nothing else seemed to be wrong. Later I noticed that some songs would only play for a minute or so and then skip to the next song in the playlist or album. And some songs wouldn't play at all. I could still listen to some of my music just fine so I ignored it in hopes it would go away. It didn't so I tried the 5 R's on the troubleshooting page and it didn't really help anything. It only made it worse. It made it so I couldn't listen to ANY song. I could go to any song in my library and once I clicked play, the little play triangle icon would show up at the top bar of the screen but the slider was stuck at 0.00 and no music would play. No music worked, but I was able to watch my podcasts, view photos, and watch most of my one movie. About 15 minutes from the end of the movie, though, it froze and went to the apple logo. After a month or so I noticed that when I plugged the iPod into my computer it made iTunes completely unresponsive no matter what I did. As soon as I disconnected the iPod it became responsive again. I searched through internet forums for help and found little to no help. I reinstalled iTunes about 3 times before giving up and putting the broken iPod on a shelf. Today I found it and thought I could possibly make it work again, and so I plugged it into my laptop (I hadn't used it before with the laptop) and nothing had changed versus the desktop; it still rendered iTunes unresponsive. So I did some research and found a couple new things. I first tried putting it into disk mode (hadn't tried that before) and it seemed to work just fine! I plugged it in and my iTunes remained the same. I renamed it just to differentiate it from my iPod Nano, and hit the sync button. While it was syncing I listened to some music and sometimes it would make the music skip just a bit or delay playing the next song, but it never completely stopped anything. I waited for it to sync my 23 gb of music, and after an hour or so I looked at it and it said something about being unable to sync because of an error (-50) or something to that effect. Later tonight I found out the diagnostic test and performed it. I couldn't get all the way through the auto test because I don't and never have had a firewire adapter, but I poked around the hard drive test and this is what I came up with:
Retracts: 21
Reallocs: 16376
Pending Sectors: 0
PowerOn Hours: 230
Start/Stops: 7686
Temp: Current 33c
Temp: Min 19c
Temp: Max 49c.
I read somewhere that the higher numbers of the reallocs and the pending sectors are bad.... And my reallocs number is astronomically high. So I'm thinking my hard drive is fried. Is it worth it to jump through all the hoops to fix it, and possibly not even be able to since I have no warranty or proof of purchase, or should I just invest in a new iPod? 

Answer 1

Thank you for a delightful and very detailed descripton of your problem. Delight because you have tried everything that this forum can offer you, and you are quite right in stating your hardisk is dying (fried). You can try Apple, but if they wont replace the Hardisk at your acceptable price, then try 3rd Party vendors near your area.
If you need max 32GB of space for music, perhaps, try a 3rd Party vendor, who can replace your hardisk with a 32GB SSD, these definitely wont give you hardisk problems.
If you are a video junkie, then junk this idea, even a 64GB SSD can set you back a few hundreds.
Have a  nice day.
PS: SSD are Solid State Drive, some use Compact Flash Memory, there are not new, been in used for some years by Apple.