iPod Clicking and beeping and inactive ipod screen

[ksoehn]

I have read many accounts of unexplained ipod beeping, and several which suggest it means the ipod hard drive is toast. Mine is a 20GB 4th gen.classic color screen (A1099). It had a low battery (I assumed) and would only show up on my itunes device menu after being plugged in a long time, and never mounted on the desktop of any Mac it was plugged into. So I erased it, reinstalled all the songs I had on itunes, then went and bought a lithium-polymer battery for that model and installed it, without running into any problems. I charged the battery through a dock for well over 12 hours, and the screen of the ipod would still not display. But the ipod icon does appear on my desktop, and in my device menu with all the songs I had installed on it. I ran through all the reset procedures for that model. Nothing changed. I let it sit for a month or so, plugged it back into the dock and computer, got nothing on the ipod screen, but, as before, got every indication that the hard drive is fine because my songs show up under the device menu, and in the itunes window. Can't play them though. This time though, the ipod begins to emit clicking sounds every ten seconds or so, does this for about 15 minutes, then emits 2 beeps close together, continues clicking for about the same time as before, then emits two pairs of beeps, then goes silent. However, when I do reset protocols again, the click reappears after 6-8 seconds, but only once each time. No change in the way it is functioning, or not. No ipod screen image. I also managed to run OSX disk utility on it once, and it said it was OK, but now when I try to use disk utility it won't unmount the ipod from the desktop. What gives. Is the logic board gone, or is it in some kind of electrical freeze that can be corrected. Is the screen gone, or is there some connection problem I can check out. I did take the screen connector off the board when I had it apart and reconnected it. I believe I did all the technical hardware procedures correctly, and I'm generally fairly adept at such things. I did get a message that said using a faster USB port would speed things up, but I hardly think that is the issue. Hoping for an epiphany.