I would try to combine iPods with all kinds of failures. Dead batteries were the easiest fix. Dead hard drives were about a quarter. Dead or cracked screens were the other quarter.
You could get aftermarket batteries pretty easy. A iPod with a dead battery was money in the bank.
I usually just wiped all the music. The very first thing done was to wipe all the photos. No need to borrow trouble.
I have an early iPod among others. Back then the hard drives were very expensive. There was a non-Apple portable music player being offered at discount for under $200, everyone snapped them up including me. We ripped out the Apple-compatible spinning hard drive and put it in our Apple iPods as an upgrade, because the hard drives retailed at around $400 to $500 each. A smaller compact-flash card was inserted in the non-Apple player to make further use of it. But iPods were the desired player of the day. A few years ago I bought some of those 1-inch hard drives for a few bucks each to use in my TAMs (1997 twentieth-Ann'y-Mac), holds much more data than the much larger original hard drives.