For step 3, you should be able to also remove the rubber rectangle at the base of the back plate exposing that connector area… stick the spudger in there and lift off the back plate. I assume there may be a reason why you didn’t use this method.. but I just did and it opened the back part enough where I could separate the rest by hand.

Still, excellent tear down… it made my speaker repair that much easier!

You probably have a hard drive and it might be clicking, I bet. Go to www.iflash.xyz and get the SD Quad unit. It lets you use Micro-SD cards in it (up to 4) as iPod storage. It works surprisingly well and is very battery efficient. Plus, you can drop it without damaging your iPod. I would think the worst you could do by dropping it is to break the display screen. :)

No. Sounds like you have a bad battery. I just went through this and bought a 3000 mAh one on eBay and it works.... :) But you can get a regular battery for pretty cheap if you can open it and get it installed. It's not incredibly hard. It's just a single ZIF connector for it.

From the playlist menu, select the one you want to shuffle and hit Play. If you have Shuffle set to Songs in the settings menu, it will shuffle everything in the playlist.

Your drive is not restored with proper iTunes firmware. Instead of buying a new hard drive, go to www.iflash.xyz and get an SD quad unit there where you can use micro SD cards for drives. Seriously. It's excellent. But do that only if you want a new drive and the other one is bad, I guess.

I have a similar problem with my iPod except mine is the center button that's not working. I chalked it down to the click wheel. Seriously. I had a bad click wheel and none of the buttons responded. I thought it was a bad mainboard so I hooked up another one running 2.0.1 instead of the other's 2.0.5 -- nope..... both wouldn't work.

So I got a new click wheel and installed it. It boots up now except the center button is the only one not working. :( Figured it was the 2.0.5 mainboard I just got so I installed it in the 2.0.1 one.... nope, same thing. I got another bad click wheel.

I wouldn't think this component could affect these buttons since the buttons are not actually on the click wheel but it's the one component that differs in both situations and the same problem is on each mainboard. :)

I know this is an old thread but I'm having this same problem. I have a feeling it's the click wheel. If it were the battery, you probably wouldn't get past the "Charging.... please wait" screen. When I replaced the clickwheel, it started booting up on its own when i put the battery in.