iPod doesn't show in iTunes after restoring

I put some new songs on my iPod before I went on holiday and once I got there songs that I'd had for month and had previously played fine were skipping part way through. Once I got home I plugged my iPod in and it wasn't recognised in iTunes. I tried again and the same thing happened. I left it a few days and then googled it which suggested holding the menu and select button at the same time once plugged in, it then was shown in tunes but said the iPod was corrupt and needed restoring. There was also a windows pop us saying that USB drive (my iPod) needed formatting which meant I would lose all content. As I had all that backed up I clicked ok and the format was complete. I then proceeded to restore my iPod it said once restore is complete the iPod will shut down after 9 seconds and then will show up in the iTunes bar which never happened (the whole time the iPod had a dull apple logo on screen) and was only shown in my computer. So I safely removed it and turned the laptop off and on again plugged the iPod back in only for the same messages to appear even the the iPod was now empty, had been restored and formatted. I selected restore and format a With the same results I repeated this 2/3 times before I gave up. The iPod will turn on and display ect although it says it's only got 2gb left (of 160) when in theory it should be empty and I never had anywhere near that music on the iPod. I googled the problem and found suggestions to hold the menu and select buttons and the left and select to enter a SMART hard drive or something which I did and the numbers looked very high in comparison. So now my iPod has no music on, almost full memory and when plugged in to iTunes needs restoring everytime and still doesn't work after that. Any help would be great thanks