Ipod does eveything but be a Ipod

[flee]

My 2G Ipod mini recently feel on the floor and stopped woking. I now get the dreaded exclamation mark and folder icon. The internal diagnostics indicate that the HD is damaged in some way. The weird things is that it "works" with itunes, windows, linux as if nothing is wrong. When I say that it "works", I mean that these programs do not recognisa that my Ipod has a problem and connect to it as normal and interact normally with it. The only software that detects a problem is the ipod updater which goes through the update process but always comes back to the screen saying thaat my ipod needs to be updated. I have tried to load linux, but even though the the different installations I have tried all seem to install, it always resets at the end to the folder icon.
I believe that the part of the disc where the boot loader resides is damaged and therefore the ipod can't boot up.
Is there anyway to reconfigure my hard drive so that it will boot from the good part of it?
Are there any microdrive diagnostics for the PC which may allow me to test and recover my hard drive?

Thanks
Lee