My iPod won't do anything - help!

I've got an iPod Classic, it must be 2 years old max now, but recently I've been having some problems with it.

For a while it's been making a funny noise and refusing to play certain songs, I just figured this was due to them being in a seperate format. However now I'm not so sure. I reset and restored the iPod, but now it won't sync with my iTunes library at all.

Looking around I've been seeing a few people saying that their hard drive has corrupted. I presume this is what has happened to mine, but is there a cheap fix at all? As a student I'm not willing to chuck out loads of money on something I could potentially do myself.. But any help would be great, thank you!