Occasionally not booting windows, now, mangled fonts

[ngray77]

Anybody see this before? (see attachment)

Chronology is:
Starting a few weeks ago, after post, it would blue screen on boot, I think not liking a sata device, or peripheral.
I disconnected my dvd burner, card reader, and ups (via usb) connection.

It still did it occasionally. Well this morning, after putting it to sleep last night, which I never do, it wouldn't post, complained about a bad bios checksum. Allowed it to reset the bios (I had a mild 5% with no vcore boost.) And it booted once. Then not the 2nd time, windows wanted to do a memchk, which hung on 75% of the first pass.
I replaced the 4gb with 2GB of some other DDR2-1066 I had.
Windows boots to login, with mangled fonts. I had to login, get the attached screenshot, and save it to a network share with the fonts like that. Reason #348 to know your keyboard accelerators!

PC details are as follows:
Intel E8400, MSI P35 Neo-2
Geforce 9800GT+
4GB OCZ PC26400 (Vista Upgrade kit)
RAM replaced during testing with Geil Black Dragon 2gb kit.
PSU is a Corsair HX620

Last time I knew anything about PC's (years back) I would think it's a bad mobo... But I don't know so much now! Any thoughts would be helpful.

 

[BadBigBen]

This is most likely not a hardware issue, but rather a corrupt drive, malware, or corrupt OS (due to the BSOD)...

now if you had the info on the BSOD, I could pinpoint the problem better...

Corrupt Drive/OS:

run CHKDSK /R from a CMD prompt or the RUN BOX...
run manufacturers testing software on the drive for hardware integrity...

Malware:

download MBAM in SafeMode with Networking, right click it and Save As option, renaming it TEST.EXE (this is to ensure that if any malware is on there that tests for the software, gets fooled)... update it and run a QUICK SCAN first then a FULL SCAN...

secondly, download on another PC, either or both of the following:

1. Avira AntiVir Rescue System...
2. Dr. Web LiveCD...


Ben

"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."

How to ask a question, when posting them to a professional forum.

 

[ngray77]

Thanks for the tip... I'm running chkdsk now, and I'll run a livedisk after.

I am tempted grab a 1TB hdd and reinstall Vista on it, and see if the problems ensue. In an hour I'd know if I have hardware or software issues.

 

[ngray77]

Ok, chkdsk ran fine, and the antivir came back clean, except for some dev and admin utilities (sysinternals, port scanner, etc) that I had on purpose.

Thought about it, and then looked in my fonts folder, which was empty. Dropped a bunch of the basic ones in from another pc, and lo and behold, my display looks like normal.

I was going to do a disk-in repair of an existing installation, but the vista disk would have no part of that.

So at this point, I've no clue, but it seems to work. Rather than further tempt fate, I'm going to fdisk this week, and just hope it was software, until proven otherwise.

 

[BadBigBen]

Glad you found the problem...

though, I must admit, that this is a first for me, that the FONT folder was wiped...



Ben

"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."

How to ask a question, when posting them to a professional forum.