My wife's mother board failed.
I took both her hard drives out and
installed them in another computer I had.

It starts to boot gets well past the bios but it hangs up
were it says on the screen "Starting Windows" above a wide
white line.

Does Windows 2000 only work on the mother board it
was installed on?

Paul,
It sounds like a video driver problem, which would be embedded in the
Win 2000 installation.   It may boot in the Safe Mode.   I can't
remember which key...try holding F8 while it boots.  You didn't say what
your intentions are, but, if you only  want to recover the files, I
found recently that the easiest way to do that is to put the drive into
one of  those cheap USB external drive boxes like this one:
http://cgi.ebay.com/NEW-3-5-USB-2-0-EXTERNAL-HARD-DRIVE-ENCLOSURE-CASE-BOX_W0QQitemZ130024938356QQihZ003QQcategoryZ41911QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

This lets you work  with the files over a protracted period of time and
move them to a new system.

Aubrey

Thats Aubrey. That is what I thought. Went to plan B.