Here is my bricked iPod. It won't even turn on.  It is time to retire it. However, it has a perfectly good 30 gig hard drive inside.  Gotta be good for something, right?

First I crack it open and get a look at the insides.

The Toshiba 2.5" IDE hard drive sits right near the top.

Next, I bought a 2.5" USB external IDE hard drive enclosure.

I installed the hard drive into the new enclosure, and it's all done. Now I have a nice external storage device.