Sounds promising. But remember that old PCs had a very small hard drive size limit. I think you'd have to get a drive smaller than 512MB.
Both this card and the xt-ide have their own bios rom, so the hard drive size is not a problem. You're likely to have a limit on the partition size, depending on what version of MSDOS you have (v3.2 was something like 32mb).
The only downside is you won't be able to utilise all the space, but right now with a failed hard drive he's not able to utilise any space. So it's an improvement.
