Unable to restore iPod, tried multiple HDD's

My 1st Gen iPod is having trouble restoring via iTunes. I have tried different Firewire cables, HDD’s and even multiple computers trying to figure something out. I needed to replace the original 5GB HDD since it was dying out (rattly noises from loose parts in the drive). However both of the new drives despite being detected by Disk Utility (DU) and iTunes, kept spitting out an error 1429 from the iPod. When in DU, the drive shows up correctly reporting the capacity of the drive, and is titled Apple iPod Media (Uninitialized). A message would appear urging me to Initialize the drive however clicking initialize does not do anything. Attempting to Partition the drive or reformat would just lead to disk utility “waiting for partitions to activate” for an infinite amount of time.

The last thing of note would be the noise that the hard drives are making. When the iPod is plugged in but not being accessed by the computer, I hear normal whirring as a hard drive should. But if I attempt to restore the iPod or format the drive, consistent clicking sound can be heard. This was the case for the 3 different drives I tried to use for this iPod. Maybe I am unlucky and got 3 dead drives, but I certainly doubt so.

Hope I could find a solution here, really want to get this treasure up and running again. I will provide any screenshots or descriptions if I had missed something out. And thanks for anyone who bothered to read and help out here. I love iFixit and the community.