Difficult question

[Hemang Shah]

Lets see if anyone gets this.

Last week suddenly when I started my laptop, all the fonts on my system
started showing weird characters... Everything, from menu, icons, dialog
boxes, everything!

So I went into appearance and with a lot of guessing and hours, I was able
to go to the classic box, where I was able to change the fonts for different
aspects of windows.

In the drop down list, I only had system listed, so I selected that.

I went thru every item on that list and anything which had font enabled, I
changed it to system.

Now a lot of things are showing up fine, (I can finally see the file names
in explorer), but system properties and dialog boxes still have these weird
characters (its some ascii).

How / Where can I change that font?

I need to share my C drive so that I can copy files over the network, but I
can't see anything as its all garbled.

Please help me out if anyone can.

Thanks

 

[David Sanders]

Sounds like time for a clean installation.

 

[Hemang Shah]

Yeah, but had to get my files off the machine first.

So removed the hdd and hooked it up to a external card and am copying stuff
off to another machine as I'm writting this, after that i'm gonna do a clean
install.

 

[Lang Murphy]

Not saying this is the preferred method... just pointing out that it is an
option.

The Vista install DVD uses Windows PE (Pre-Installation Environment) 2.0 as
the OS to which the DVD boots. Let's call it WinPE 2.0.

So... your system gets hosed somehow and you need to copy files off the hard
drive but Vista won't boot.

You can, assuming the hard drive hasn't gotten totally scrambled, boot from
the Vista DVD, select Repair System or whatever the Repair menu choice is
called, if presented with a dlg to chose an OS, select whatever, click next,
then click on the Command Window link.

First thing, check to see that you can see the source drive. WinPE 2.0 for
Vista install defaults to the dir x:\windows\sources. Try to change to C:,
if that's the drive you want to use as the source drive. If the cmd win
takes you to C: and will dislplay a dir of it, you should be good to go.

Plug in whatever USB device to which you want to copy files, wait 30 seconds
or so, figure out the drive letter to which your USB device has been
mounted. I do this by simply typing different drive letters into the command
window, e.g., "x:\windows\sources\>d: <enter> and do a dir to see if it's
the drive I think it is.

So then you've got a method to copy files from your OS corrupted drive to
the external USB device without having to remove the hard drive from the
problem PC.

Like I said; just another option...

Lang