Mac, you're quite right to wonder about the FAT/NTFS thing just as I did, but with nothing to lose I went right ahead and it was absolutely perfect. Partition Magic 6 running on Win98/FAT32 could read and identify the NTFS volume of the Win 2K partition and copy it (over USB from an external Enclosure containing a redundant HDD).
The laptop is up and running as we "speak" (as it jolly well should!).
So, with the "clean" Win 2K I tried the Registry restore routine and got the same answer.
So my question remains: "What's the point?"