One way to go would be to hook it up and see what happens, if you are having trepidations about doing that you could take it to a shop and have them do the testing for you, which they could do using an enclosure, it would cost you a few bucks probably not much. My gut feeling is that it will either work or it will not, as to doing damage to the system I'd say unlikely.
Several months ago my Compaq computer was fried during a massive power surge despite being powered down and having a surge protector. The power supply was fried and the motherboard damaged. The dvd-writer is okay and the 250 GB hard drive I am not sure about as I didn't have a SATA drive compatible computer to test it on.
Recently I got an almost identical computer that has Win 7 for almost nothing. I wanted to test the 250 GB hard drive on the new model to see if it was damaged. Does anybody think that if the drive was damaged in the surge it could damage the new computer? I know it's possible but I wasn't sure how likely it was.
If the 250 GB drive is okay I was thinking about wiping the drive clean of the Win Xp operating system that is on it and using it in the new computer in addition to it's 80 GB drive.

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