iBook hard drive replacement

[Reid Conti]

Howdy!

My snow (dual USB) 12" 600mhz ibook has had a failing drive for some 
time ... Damn IBM travelstars!

Had the click of death, so a few times I woke up in the morning and the 
thing was going nuts and hard crashed...

lately, it's gotten worse.  While running safari, mostly, the hard 
drive will make loud metallic clicking noises (definitely not good!) 
and the whole system locks up.. also, sometimes when I wake up in the 
AM, it's hung.

So two questions.

First off, I got Panther in December, but left my CD's in another 
state.  as fate would have it, I happen to have my Jaguar CD's.  Would 
it be at all useful to me to boot off the Jag CDs and run disk repair, 
or is it a Bad Thing to try to repair a journalled disk with Jaguar's 
CDs?  Perhaps borrow a Panther CD if I can find someone else who has it 
nearby?

Honestly, I think the drive itself is dying, but the fact that it seems 
to only happen while running Safari, makes me think perhaps there are 
some bad sectors that maybe a disk util could mark as bad?  Not even 
sure if the OS X disk utility is this advanced..

Secondly, what should I keep in mind for a new drive?  I think I'll 
install it myself, unless I'm gonna be able to find someone to charge 
me less than $50 for the work, which is doubtful.  I've seen the 
instructions online and it doesn't look too bad.  But can I use any ATA 
laptop hard disk, or are there things I need to keep in mind (disk or 
ibook firmware-wise)?  I'm thinking of a 60-80gb, 4200 or 5400rpm 
drive... I see Hitachi, Samsung, Toshiba, Seagate, etc models on 
newegg...

thanks for your help!

- reid