I have seen a number of iPods go “bad” where you suddenly have a problem where the iPod stops working on certain songs, and even after reinitialising the iTunes update stops before updating the whole library.

The situation seems impossible to resolve with the normal tools.

In these situations one particular problem seems to be caused by one or more bad sectors on the internal iPod harddisk, and the only way I've found around this is to use a disc surface scanner that will reassign these bad sectors (even though they should normally automatically be reassigned by the harddisk firmware when it tries to write to the bad sector).

IMHO the best tool is “Media Scanner” - part of SpeedTools, a excellent collection of disk tools. It will do any number of scans of each sector on the disk, and manually or automatically reassign any bad sectors it finds.

This is what happened when I received yet one more of my sons friends “dead” iPods :

(Click for larger image)
Sector number 22,405,262 on volume 'Mr I.Pod' was reported bad.Sector scan on volume named 'Mr I.Pod' completed on Monday, October 9, 2006 at 19:33:38 with no bad sectors found.

The bad sector was successfully reassigned.

Sector number 22,405,265 on volume 'Mr I.Pod' was reported bad. The bad sector was successfully reassigned automatically.

The iPod now works normally.

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