Malformed characters during boot - what might be wrong?

augusto

augusto

augusto

Associate
Joined
3 Nov 2011
Posts
22
Hi everyone!

I have an old PC that started showing malformed characters during boot and windows started to fail to start up. I wonder if these malformed characters can point to the potential issue (cpu, mobo, etc). Here are a couple of pictures

IO2uYvN.jpg
NmINxcW.jpg


On the first picture the D, 5 and e look weird, and on the 2nd one the 'd' and 'u' looks weird. The PC boots up ok as far as I can tell, and there are no odd beeps.

The specs of the PC are
* GA-X58A-UD3R Rev 2
* Intel Core i7 950
* XFX Radeon R7800

I gave this PC to my neighbours son about 4 years. It was a bit quite dusty inside but nothing too bad, I'm planning to give it a good clean in case it's some dust that is creating a small short circuit somewhere.

Thanks in advance!
 
Last edited:
If you click on the images you can see that the letters are not right. I don't have a ton of experience repairing PCs, but the couple of times I've seen PCs with something like this there was a hardware problem.

I've reinstalled windows a couple of times but it goes into a black screen after the initial set up (when one needs to select keyboard layout; create account; etc). Another thing I noticed is that when I get the black screen after windows starts to load, the USB ports stop working (the mouse and keyboard are 'shut down').
 
Normally this is early signs of either the physical memory (RAM) failing or VRAM failing, occasionally on older systems it can be caused by the North Bridge chipset on the motherboard being on the way out.

Assuming everything is correctly configured in the BIOS i.e. RAM timings then unfortunately it is likely impending hardware failure and will likely get worse over a few weeks of usage and cause random crashing, etc.

First thing I'd do is swap out the GPU if you can to see if that is the point of failure. After that give Memtest86+ or similar a run to see if the RAM is faulting - that doesn't necessarily mean the RAM is failing it might be misconfiguration if the BIOS has been reset, etc.
 
Last edited:
augusto said:
If you click on the images you can see that the letters are not right. I don't have a ton of experience repairing PCs, but the couple of times I've seen PCs with something like this there was a hardware problem.

I've reinstalled windows a couple of times but it goes into a black screen after the initial set up (when one needs to select keyboard layout; create account; etc). Another thing I noticed is that when I get the black screen after windows starts to load, the USB ports stop working (the mouse and keyboard are 'shut down').
Click to expand...
Yes, you're right enough. I initially looked at the pics on my phone but now I'm on my PC it's very clear there's something not right. I defer to Rroff who obviously knows his stuff.
 
Mr Evil said:
If it's always the same letters then it could be that the BIOS itself has become corrupt. Try re-flashing it.
Click to expand...

A good possibility but a system of that age probably doesn't have the ability to flash the BIOS without CPU/RAM so you'd want to eliminate those issues first or you could end up with a corrupt BIOS to add to the woes.

One easy thing to do is boot up with only 1 RAM stick at a time and cycle through the sticks to see if one is causing the issue.
 
Last edited:
Thanks once more for the suggestions! I'm going to do a bit of testing this afternoon and I'll report back in case it's of use for anyone in the future.
 
The culprit was the video card.

I took the following steps (as Rroff and Throwaway suggested).
  • Removed all the RAM and started the PC with one dimm at a time -> the issue persisted.
  • Took a bit of a risk and reflashed the bios, which was successful -> the issue persisted
  • Replaced the video card with a very humble nvidia GT 210 and the problem was gone!
After this the previous (re)installation of windows started normally. Installed all the windows updates + some software and the PC worked fine.

Another symptom I saw is that during the boot sequence the letters would have a 'red' shadow. This happened at my neighbour's home too, but didn't happen initially testing at home. Imagine the same screenshot I shared originally, the white text would have a couple of extra red pixels on the bottom-right. It looked similar as in old newspapers when there was colour image, but the red was shifted off centre.

Again, thanks a lot for you help Rroff, BlueCube, throwaway and Mr Evil!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom