[jbk]

I had a rare lockup last night and had to reboot with the magic button. When the system restarted all text displayed with fonts was corrupted. Actually, to be more specific, the text looks like character codes have been shifted into the extended character set because what I see predominantly are graphical things (lines, symbols, gobble-dee-guk...).

I've tried to do a number of things without success.

1. Copy fonts in from my XP CD. However, even booting to safe mode/command line some fonts are protected. Attrib had no effect on these.

2. Yelled.

3. chkdsk/f -- no improvement.

4. More yelling.

5. Tried to reinstall SP2 (thought that might trigger something) but since I can't read the prompts I have to pretty much go by memory or guess and my first attempt caused the install to quit. At 2am I figured that was a sign to take a break.

I downloaded SP2 at work and am going to burn it to a cd. I think that's my best shot to shaking out the problem. However, any insights/help would be much appreciated. Feel free to email me directly if you have the answer.

Thanks.

[Advertisements]

Have you done a windows repair from your windows XP CD?

[jbk]

I can't boot to the CD -- that stupid "CBOOT: couldn't find ntldr" error. Evidently the only way to fix that is to fix something in the registry so I'm SOL there. I was able to get into the "return to a previous day's settings" screen but going back before the day of the problem didn't help. I was able to run a full sfc scan last night and it didn't report anything wrong. I wonder if it is just a matter of finding a way to update those hidden/write-protected fonts...

I'm thinking that I may end up having to find a way to do a full system backup and then rebuild and restore. It'd suck to restore the problem, however.

I keep thinking there must be another way to force that repair mode other than the one way.

Anyways, thanks for your reply.

[Tyger]

It sounds like some of your settings weren't saved during the shutdown. Or the file they are saved in became corrupted. Is this for all applications that use fonts, or just certain ones, like Notepad or Word?

You might try a Restore Back to a date before this happened.

[gerryf]

"CDBOOT: couldn't find ntldr" error.

Is this an original windows xp cd?

This usually implies
a) your cd is damaged
b) your motherboard is not eltorito compliant
c) your cd copy was burned incorrectly

I agree, it sounds like a file was corrupted in the middle of read/write and that a repair is your solution

[jbk]

I can open the cmd window and read text fine, but I obviously have limited functionality there. There are some app interfaces that come up with readable stuff but I believe those are graphics rather than font text. Any app that uses font text is corrupted. I've wondered if maybe there's a setting for default system fonts someplace but getting to it would be fun considering I can't read where I'm going. Thanks for your thoughts.

[jbk]

Unfortunately the other catch-22 is when I put my original xppro cd in (pre-sp2) it rejects installing to "an older version" of xp. Wouldn't burning an iso image of xppro/sp2 from msdn be correct and bootable? Thanks.

[gerryf]

reinstall your fonts

Do you have a windows disk?

Make a folder C:\Tempfont.

Put the XP CD in the drive and exit from the auto-run.

Start > Run, type
CMD
enter

type
d:
enter

type
CD i386
enter

type
enter
EXPAND *.TT_ C:\TEMPFONT

type
EXPAND *,FO_ C:\TEMPFONT
enter

type
C:
enter

type
CD \TEMPFONT
enter

type
REN *.TT_ *.TTF
enter

type
REN *.FO_ *.FON
enter

type
EXIT


then go to control panel, choose FONTs applet

then FILE > INSTALL NEW FONTS

navigate to c:\tempfonts

select all and add

[jbk]

Thanks! I'll give that a try.

[jbk]

Tried it over lunch. Was able to install the fonts as suggested but had no impact on the problem. It's beginning to sound like it's a deeper corruption issue...

Is there a cache associated with screens and fonts? Maybe something like that was corrupted and the system doesn't know better. Just brainstorming...

Thanks again.

[matt_fleming]

Tough problem... this may sounds like a silly question, but do you have system restore on?

-Matt

[jbk]

Not a silly question at all. One of the things I also tried was restoring to earlier settings. No effect. Whatever is messed up is something that has a state that is saved for restore.