My current hard drive is sluggish and i want to reformat and reload my
windows 2000... but there are programs that i either downloaded from
net and or borrow the program from a friend.

i want to add a fresh new os hard drive and make my old drive a slave...

can i still access the programs and data even though the programs will
no longer reside on the "C" drive?

The sluggishness could be that the drive is fragmented, but also if it
has too little free space for virtual memory.

Use Norton Ghost to mirror your drive to a new hard drive.

But of cause it does it in such a way that if your drive is badly
fragmented  that it will still be fragmented on the new drive.

But, what you will have then are two drives you can boot off, so you
can clean and defrag the first drive without risk to your software.
Remember to check the boot off the second drive though, I followed the
instructions wrong on my first copy with it, not really sure where I
went wrong, but on the second attempt it worked fine.