I went ahead and ordered that toy from Tiger Direct. It'll take a few days to get here but at least now I feel as if I'm making some progress!
If that doesn't work I'll be looking for a professional who knows how to make this thing work.
Lesson learned: Back up to
removable media. I figured I was totally safe backing up to a spare hard drive but it turns out that getting a Windows machine to read the extra hard drive is more of an adventure than I had imagined!