Chosen Solution
My iPod freezes instantly when the “Shuffle Songs” button is pressed, and will also freeze when just playing songs (some songs won’t cause this, others freeze it instantly, and still others freeze in the middle of the song). It is also not detected in iTunes on Mac, and it can’t be re-formatted in Disk Utility. Is the hard drive broken, or is this a software issue?
If you cannot reformat it in Disk Utility it could possibly be a broken hard drive. It may be worth your while to open it up using this guide and once you have the hard drive out of the machine shake it just a tad and if you hear any excessive rattling it is probably broken. Hope this helps.
