I should've put more info in the original post, I apologize.

I did purchase a spare IDE cable, and swapping that out as well as re-pressing the crimp as well as swapping the drives out, same result.

My horrible hack for the snapped pin isn't working either. I just went to Fry's to see if they had something I could use to replace the whole IDE head, but as I'm sure most everyone knows, something like that just doesn't seem to be readily available.

I wonder how much a 40g iPod costs :/