So, the other day a guy brought his iPod in for me to look at, because it was misbehaving, and had the most adorable little error screen ever:
Awww.
So anyway. I hooked it up to my Mac, but it wouldn't mount (show up on the desktop), and Disk Utility couldn't see it, although System Profiler recognized that there was an unknown device attached to the firewire port. Disk Warrior couldn't see it either, incidentally. When I turned it on it would just go to the sad iPod screen, then shut itself off. I tried resetting it (hold select + play), to no avail, and couldn't get it into diagnostic mode or disk mode either. Huh. So I did a bunch of googling, and some guy mentioned that his had miraculously recovered well enough for him to get the music off it when he had accidentally knocked it off his desk. He had uploaded a recording of the sound his iPod's hard drive was making, and it sounded quite similar to the clicky noise this iPod was making. Hmmm.
Yes, this is going where you think it is.
I dropped the guy's iPod from about two feet off the ground, and turned it on.
It totally worked after that.