ipod classic stuck in recovery mode

hello, i have an iPod Classic 120 GB, i noticed recently it was stuttering and freezing a few seconds every now and again in the menus so i decided to reset it by holding menu+select. it reset but when it came back on it asked me to pick a language, i picked english and all my content was gone, much like during a restore. when i got home i plugged it into iTunes, got an error message that said it had to be restored, after restoring it went into recovery mode so of course i got the message it was in recovery mode and had to restored. i have tried restoring a few more times but it keeps going into recovery mode and thats where it still is. i read somewhere about enabling disk mode after a restore and dragging certain files onto the ipod to make it work again, this sounds to me like basically a manual restore, i never got the chance to try it as the files were hosted on a mediafire link that is no longer active. I am simply wondering if anyone has heard of this, where/how i can do it, or any other way to get past this never ending cycle. I have it enabled in disk mode and i want to go poke around at the files but it only shows up in iTunes and not on my sidebar under devices (I still run OS X Leopard 10.5.8) Any other way to access the files? thank you!