If the 2 machines are identical in every respect you should have no
problem.
If the 2 machines are different, it'll be a kludge to do and maybe not
worth it. You should understand that unlike NT4, W2k (NT5) is "bound" in
various ways to the specific mainboard and other gear when installed,
and it is arduous even to upgrade the mainboard in a W2k machine. You
can browse these newsgroups to find a great deal of traffic on this
subject, and the MS knowledge base also has discussions of it. Most
people, I suspect, just do a clean new W2k install when they upgrade a
motherboard. Simply booting a W2k to a different mainboard never works;
that error message is normal.
That said, you might possibly be able to do what you want if you
configure the HDD as a dual boot, with one W2k for one machine and the
other for the 2nd machine. This would also require installing each app
on both W2ks and installing everything else (SPs, upgrades, and so on)
twice also. But you'd be able to share data on that HDD perfectly well
if you configure carefully to isolate it from the 2 W2k partitions.
The safest dual boot config, if you really want to do this, would
probably be one of the several 3rd party boot managers that makes the
unbooted system/boot partition invisible when the other is booted. There
would then be no chance of inadvertent corruption of the "unused" W2k
partition.
You don't mention the problem you're trying to solve...and depending on
what it is, there may be other simpler ways of solving it. Post a
followup if you think it might be helpful.
