Dear General Winters and jdc2000,
Thank you for your responses and your patience.
(General Winters, I really appreciate your encouraging story of successful annihilation of squealing and grinding)

At the end of this reply, I will post the info from my Belarc Advisor system report. It probably includes more information than you need in order to tell me about compatible HD's, but as I do not understand much of what the report is telling me, I apologize for asking you to cull from it relevant info.

jdc2000, yes, it was my original intention to be able to dual boot, but I wholeheartedly accept your advice that it would be a "pain", and I am now not even going to think about attempting it. However, if restoring the image to a partition on the laptop would allow me to at least access files, that may be a reasonable interim measure, both to confirm the integrity of an image (now on 4 CD's) and also to have the files available during any downtime while I may be setting up a new '98 HD. Am I correct in thinking that I would restore the image to a logical partition, just as I would create for data files?

Following is my Belarc report. I know you will be suitably impressed by the cutting-edge technology I have at my fimgertips, and wonder why I don't display the specs in my sig. I was pleased to note that the report shows my HD status as healthy, for now.

Chas

Profile Date: Friday, April 20, 2007 3:06:23 PM
Advisor Version: 7.1h

Operating System
Windows 98 SE (build 10.2222)

System Model
AOpen America AOpen CUSTOM-PC

Processor a
500 megahertz Intel Pentium III
32 kilobyte primary memory cache
512 kilobyte secondary memory cache

Main Circuit Board b
Bus Clock: 100 megahertz
BIOS: Award Software International, Inc. 4.60 PGMA 08/02/99

Drives
10.25 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity
4.92 Gigabytes Hard Drive Free Space

ATAPI CD-ROM DRIVE-40X
SONY CD-RW CRX140E [CD-ROM drive]
Generic floppy disk drive (3.5")

QUANTUM FIREBALL CX10.2A [Hard drive] (10.26 GB) -- drive 0, s/n 833923854091, rev A3F.0B00, SMART Status: Healthy

Memory Modules c,d
320 Megabytes Installed Memory

Slot '0' has 64 MB
Slot '1' is Empty

Local Drive Volumes
c: (FAT32 on drive 0)10.25 GB4.92 GB free

Controllers
Standard Floppy Disk Controller
Intel 82371AB/EB PCI Bus Master IDE Controller
Primary IDE controller (dual fifo)
Secondary IDE controller (dual fifo)

Display
RAGE PRO TURBO AGP 2X (English) [Display adapter]
Acer 15.2 [Monitor] (15.2"vis, August 1999)

Bus Adapters
Intel 82371AB/EB PCI to USB Universal Host Controller