Try holding the sleep and home button at the same time. Hold them until you see a white apple appear on the screen (ignore the shutdown screen and keep holding the buttons until you get to the white apple. REMEMBER HOLD TILL THE WHITE APPLE!)

When holding the buttons for a hard reboot you will see:

Screen with shutdown message and slider

black screen

White apple screen

It might just need the hard reboot.

I cant even get my iPod touch to restart by holding the sleep/wake button and the home button. when i do that nothing happens.

Not sure if holding both would work since the issue is the sleep wake button does not work anyway.

An alternative would be to go into settings > General > Auto Lock > set auto - lock to one minute.

Then when your iPod is not being used it will go to sleep after 1 minute.

Not a perfect solution but better then a dead battery.

Hope it helps.

Did u find a solution? I found that the contact ( a little spring metalic thing ) of the lock button was missing.. i've been searching the web but i dont find any replacement part..

i dont know how to do it but i know you have to get inside the ipod but it cracke's your screen wso i wouldnt try it

My ipod was working fine until the lock button or the top button was not working. So I put it on to auto-lock but I am gonna take it to the apple store to have them look at it.

I can help you diagnose the problem here. First take off your backplate so you can see the battery and logic board. In the top right corner you will see a gold "z" spring. take a small screwdriver and angle it on the ipod touch somewhere that is metal and touch it to the z spring. you need to make a ground, you can even just move it around a bunch trying to make a connection. If the ipod sleeps or wakes up then you just need a flex cable for the sleep button,,

my ipod 2G has the same problem...even worse...the sleep/wake button doesn't respond and it gets in standby when it wants. the screen gets dark and i have to wait since i can wake it again. it drives me crazy!

please help