Malformed characters during boot - what might be wrong?

augusto · 2 Aug 2023 at 10:34

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

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!

augusto · 2 Aug 2023 at 17:06

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').

augusto · 2 Aug 2023 at 20:27

Thanks folks! I'll see if I can revive it. It has a good 13 years of use

augusto · 3 Aug 2023 at 11:10

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.

augusto · 3 Aug 2023 at 17:35

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!