With Windows 2k? I'm not fully certain. In my experience, plugging in a hard drive with certain Windows OSes would result in the machine wigging out over driver/hardware incompatibility errors. I do know that Windows 7 will just shrug it's meta-shoulders and look through its generic driver database for the closest thing that matches. (This is kinda how I'm bypassing a faulty northbridge chip on my laptop - by letting Windows 7 determine what video driver is most effective. Hilarious that the native ATI Catalyst driver is incapable of doing this without screwing up my machine... again.)
But at any rate, you can at least try. If I recall correctly, it will merely BSOD on you at worst and leave everything intact on the drive. At best, it will do what Windows 7 does as I described.
EDIT: Bluemage, IIRC this is easily sorted out by ensuring that you got one drive on the same channel set as the master and the other set as the slave. Two drives max per IDE channel, one Master, one Slave. Check the jumper settings on the back of both drives and make sure you have the correct jumpers in place. If no instructions for this are printed on the drive, then you'll need to look them up online. Fortunate you are that you still have a viable machine to connect to the Internet.
EDIT2: and in case you haven't noticed: for me, this is a 'Tuesday' sort of thing. My time in the Navy had a tendency to do that to laptops. :p
But at any rate, you can at least try. If I recall correctly, it will merely BSOD on you at worst and leave everything intact on the drive. At best, it will do what Windows 7 does as I described.
EDIT: Bluemage, IIRC this is easily sorted out by ensuring that you got one drive on the same channel set as the master and the other set as the slave. Two drives max per IDE channel, one Master, one Slave. Check the jumper settings on the back of both drives and make sure you have the correct jumpers in place. If no instructions for this are printed on the drive, then you'll need to look them up online. Fortunate you are that you still have a viable machine to connect to the Internet.
EDIT2: and in case you haven't noticed: for me, this is a 'Tuesday' sort of thing. My time in the Navy had a tendency to do that to laptops. :p