I thank everyone for their suggestions. I should have said that the disc I am discarding is not my boot drive (Mulga's impression was right).
My new disc is a Western Digital WDC WD1200JB-00CRA0. It is an OEM disc, so it does not come with an installation disc, but I downloaded a bootable floppy disc with Data Lifeguard software from wdc.com.
As recommended, I removed my CD-ROM and attached the hard disc to my secondary IDE cable as a slave to my CD-R/RW. Using the Data Lifeguard installation utility, I attempted to partition and format the disc, but it hung while preparing the first partition, which I set to 80GB (at least I presume so, since it has been claiming to be preparing Partition 1 for the last twelve hours). I am wondering whether 80GB is too big for a FAT32 partition. "640K ought to be enough for anybody." -- Bill Gates, 1981