Okay, i recently got a sad Mac on my iPod and the iTunes application couldn't restore it. I next tried to format it in Windows 7 and still no go. Diskpart sees nothing on the drive and refused to create a partition on it and the Disk Management console sees the drive as a raw 50GB drive? Next option, low level format with HDD 4.12 and after six hours I'm about halfway through but the error log is frighteningly long with:

Format error occurred at offset n (23)

being recorded at the rate of 3/second. What is causing these errors and will the format process fix them? How do you go from a new blank drive to a working iPod?

update:
The disk formatted only shows size of 13GB in your formatting tool, Windows Disk Management console still sees a 50GB raw drive. Which is right? By the way, I formatted a second time.There were no errors and it was three times faster to do it this time but the issue above remains.