Depending on what's wrong with the HD, you might be able to access the other one or two partitions on the HD, though you can't access the XP partition. But the other partitions are hidden, I think.
It would be the old HD that had the restore partition. I'm told in the Dell group that this partition can be copied too, which is not surprising, but I'm guessing you have to first unhide it. And you can't do that with the Storage Management software in XP afaik but you can with 3rd-party software, like Partition Magic 8, Paragon free and Easeus free Partition Manager, though the latter and maybe Paragon will ruin a win98 partition if you try to change its size, even when runnning under XP.
However all restore will do is put it back the way the factory shipped it. Did it have special features that XP from MS doesn't have. If
Is this a laptop that requires special drivers. Can you dl them from emachine?
If it has nothing special and you can get the drivers, you can use a retail XP CD but use the Product Key from this computer.
But better yet, see Michael Terrell's first post. I think if you use an emachine DVD, you don't need to know the product key. At least I think that is true for Dell, so I'm guessing it's the same.
I haven't read the rest.