would someone help me out? please.

can someone help? i have a 5th gen ipod and it just stopped working today. it has the "sad face" screen on and i tried to follow the instructions on the site for restoring. i forced it into disk mode and when i plug it in to my laptop, itunes will only recognize it sometimes. when it does recognize the ipod i click on restore and then restore and update. it then shows a status bar of its progress but the ipod disappears in the panel on the left that shows the connected ipod. my ipod goes to the apple screen and then to the sad face screen and then shuts off. and itunes still says that it is restoring when its not....what's going on? someone please help. i have the latest version of itunes and everything. i don't know what else to do.