I've been slowly buying parts to deck out a beat up iPod 5.5 I got on eBay, and I finally got everything. I decided to first replace the hard drive, but it's been giving me a headache for 4 hours now.

I have a single 256gb amazon basics SD card in there, which could be the problem, but no other SD card I've tested has worked either. I have to force it to go into disk mode, it takes at least a minute every time, and it's not completely consistent either. It usually defaults to the apple support screen and then to the very low battery screen. When I do get it into disk mode, I plug it into my PC, and I get a connection sound, but it's not detected in iTunes, file explorer, or disk management. It is detected in device manager; I found a thread that said to uninstall the iPod through there, but it didn't do anything. Additionally, the iPod shuts off and reboots after about a minute when in disk mode. This has been much the same experience when plugging it into a mac. With the original hard drive, it worked perfectly, bar some weird issues with the battery, which is pretty weak, but it seems to do fine with enough charge. I'm at a total loss here. If anyone has any advice or fixes, it would be much appreciated.

Edit: ok, I still haven't fixed it, but I've gotten the restore screen to show up once. When I connected it to my PC, iTunes saw it, asked to restore, and then...did nothing. iTunes stopped seeing the iPod after that. I reseated the adapter again, and now it just shows the apple support screen again. The only thing I've done different is put a little bit of tape on the bottom of the ribbon connector, in hopes that it would make better contact, but this isn't a new thing I've done, it has been there for the past day or so.

Edit 2: I've added another layer of tape to the ribbon connector, and I now get the restore screen on the iPod pretty consistently, so I think the actual connection being made to the board is the problem. I still can't get it to restore though, when I connect it to my PC iTunes and disk manager just freeze until i disconnect the iPod. Also, the diagnostic mode on the iPod shows varying results, from a blank screen to 4GB capacity read, but never what I want to see.

Edit 3: I don't want to get my hopes up too high, but I think I've solved the issue. I noticed that the tape I put on the cable slides down when I put it into the connector, so I inserted a piece of paper into the connector first, and then put the connector in. I was able to restore the iPod successfully, even though it was a little buggy, and iTunes seems to be able to read it fine. My suspicion of the connector and cable not making a good connection seems to have been correct.

I've seen a few other people with this issue using the imCort adapters from moonlit market, and I've noticed the connector on these boards is slightly different from others I've seen online, so I suspect this connector is faulty. I'm gonna try to contact moonlit market themselves about this, and I will try to make others aware of it as well.