3rd Gen Ipod Freezes on certain songs.

[musiclover7]

Being somewhat adept with computers, I would assume that my issue is most likely coming from some bad sectors on the hard drive, but I am posting here to comfirm...

Basically, I restore my ipod, and load some songs into it. For the most part it works fine, but then undoubtably, there will be some songs that won't play. In fact, if I try to play them, the whole thing goes cupoot, and if I am lucky, I can force it to shut down. Otherwise it just sits there. Sometimes this happens in the middle a song or like 7 seconds in, which is interesting, as I was told that the ipod loaded the entire song into memory, before it started playing it.

Anywhoo, I will then restore the ipod, and start over, only to find that the problem will repeat itself somewhere shortly down the road, only on different songs this time.

So my question. Ist there a way to run a disk check on the ipod hard drive? Apple strongly suggests against this on their website, so I am appealing here to those of you who might know how to do some basic HD diagnostics, and or repairs.

All ideas, thoughts, leftover morsels... welcome and encouraged!!

[schwartze]

Can you narrow down the songs that do this?

Are they ripped from a CD? Purchased from the iTunes store? Gotten off of a p2p network?

Corrupt song files sometimes do this.

[musiclover7]

It is not the same songs everytime I restore. The songs work fine, and are mostly songs I aquired off the internet. In other words, the songs that freeze up one time, will not freeze up after I restore the ipod, however, different songs will. Makes me think there are bad clusters on the hard drive, but I am looking to try to confirm that.

[dashdanw]

check the bitrate on the songs, is it high? (>256)