It won't damage anything if you put the EMPEG formatted drive in the notebook, however you will need to repartition and format, since it wont be bootable on the notebook, OR
the best way to do it, (the way we do it at work) is we have
those notebook drive adapters, 2 of them, connect both drives to a desktop pc, and use norton ghost to ghost one to the other, doesn't matter if the new one is larger/smaller, norton ghost can adjust that, just as long as your not using Win95A and the data size doesn't exceed destination disk size,
you should be ok :), do a disk - disk ghost,
you can also do it over ethernet, if you have a full retail copy of norton ghost you can make a ethernet boot disk which has a large database of supported ethernet chips/adapters, you maybe able to get away with generic ones on your notebook.