NWR - Thought iPod was dead..but fixed it!

Last weekend my sister's iPod stopped playing and showed the folder with exclamation point icon. If I put the iPod up to my ear, it sounds like the hard drive is spinning about two times and then makes a 'click click' and then repeats the process. If I plug it into the computer Firewire port, it will charge and give me the 'Do Not Disconnect' message, but iTunes does not recognize it. And the hard drive clicks like it did before. It remained in that state almost twelve hours yesterday!! I wanted to do a full restore using the most recent version of iTunes but since the iPod isn't recognized in the program I couldn't. I googled a description of the problem and found some advice. I was really skeptical at first but thought what the heck.

THE FIX: (another person's description of their problem found online)
Mine periodically does exactly the same thing, and I have found that thumping it reasonably hard on one side or the other gets it back on track and playing normally. It has been taking this abuse for months now, and a hard enough thump has worked every single time, with no other detrimental effects.

WOULD YOU BELIEVE I DID JUST THAT AND IT WORKED. THE iPod IS NOW BACK TO NORMAL I'm reasonably sure that the HD has some bad sector in it somewhere that is causing the 'death click' I will try and do more research into repairing and restoring the HD