Can a bootable HDD be damaged just by plugging it into a usb of a running pc?

I have two identical acer 10 inch notebooks running XP sp2. One of them developed a problem, during boot, it says one of the files is missing or corrupt. I thought, how lucky am I to have an identical machine to troubleshoot with. After going through all the simple things, I took the hard drive out, and using an adapter cable, I plugged it into the other notebook while it was running. The wizard automatically recognized the new hardware, and said it was installed and ready to use It also came up with a box with the flashlight, and a cancel box. I thought it must be trying to start up, so I hit "cancel". It's a small SATA HD, with no switches for "master" or "slave". I ran chkdsk on it, and at each step it says it cannot be read. I unplugged the HD, and put it back into the problem notebook, and now it doesn't even try to boot, it just says it cannot be read... Did windows do something to the hard drive when I plugged it in? Like put it into some sort of read only mode, or removed the partitions?

 

Hot swapping in theory should not damage a HDD and 99 times out of 100 it works OK but that 1 time may result in a defect.