One week old, very low battery, and sad icon

I took advantage of the "buy a mac, get an ipod" deal, and used the rebate toward an 80G model. I live on Maui, the nearest apple store is on Oahu(separate islands in Hawaii, fyi), and they were out of matte screen macbook, so with the help of one of the SAs I wound up ordering everything online. The laptop has yet to arrive (grrr) but the ipod arrived exactly a week ago.

Needless to say, i loved it... except when I took it out of my purse today, it was dead. Silly me, i didn't put it on "hold".

So I plug it in, and it says "please wait, very low battery" ...and then it makes a soft pinging noise & that sad face icon comes on.

What i read so far sounds like i need to restart the ipod, but can/should I do that with a very low battery? Also, it's now been about 45min since i plugged it in, with no change & iTunes still doesn't recognize it.

Is it still charging, even with a possible hardware issue? Should I leave it in & keep my fingers crossed?

Or do I just bite the bullet & fill out an online service form already? Because yes, egotistical me got the darn thing engraved with my name.

How long do repairs usually take, anyway?

Thank you for your help & patience!

Sounds like it's locked up and the battery isn't charging.

I wouldn't panic just yet. Try doing a reset on it, while it's connected to your computer via USB.

Hi, I've had an 80Gb iPod for about 6 weeks and when I went to use it today I had the same error (but didn't get the sad face icon), I tried everything from the Apple web site including a reset, reboot of my Mac, changing USB ports but still no luck. I called Apple and they didn't offer any more options and said that they will arrange for it to be collected for repair. :-(

Steve

...so follow up... totally bummed... could not reset it, nor put it in disk mode... as a last ditch i took it to an official apple reseller that said they didn't do repairs, but would try to troubleshoot.... and when they looked it over, they told me i'd have to send it back... so now i'm waiting for that little box apple sends for you to send it back...