It's clicking at me!

My faithful iPod has started acting weird, as of early this morning, the device crashed and refuses to power up, showing me the Sad iPod face accompanied by audible clicking from the hard drive. Now my first thought was, "oh no the hard drive is shot" but after careful testing, and playing around in the internal diagnostics, I've determined that the battery being bad is more likely the culprit, as it seems like the device cannot get far enough in its startup sequence to negotiate more power out of the USB port. A lack of power would prevent the disk from properly spinning up and locking the arm in place, and thus prevent boot. It also explains why the Sad iPod face kind of fizzles out after a few moments, like the LCD is losing power, and then it switches to the "Please Wait, Very Low Battery" screen. All symptoms point to a severely exhausted power cell, and I intend to fix this by using the cigarette light adapter I borrowed from Matt Franklin to power the sucker off a car, hopefully that will rejuvenate it enough to at least hang off the USB port for power while I determine if the battery is really FUBAR or if this is a fluke. Comments appreciated! Using a power supply that doesn't need any kind of confirmation before opening the floodgates should eliminate this problem.

UPDATE:
The car charger was ineffective at resolving the problem, so I'll be dissecting the iPod soon, but at this point it's academic. I've committed to purchasing this for my new BlackBerry when I get it next week and it will replace the iPod as portable music player simply because it's already in the budget (I can't afford a new iPod) and because it's one less device to carry. I will post photos of the disassembly and see if I can revive the iPod.