Intermittent Black screen on reboot with strange characters

[Guest]

Occasionally when I reboot my PC, it does not boot up to the Windows XP
screen. Instead it displays a black screen with 7 or 8 strange looking
characters in the upper left hand corner. They look a little like Korean
symbols. At any rate it may take sveral reboots or pulling the power for a
minute before the system will reboot normally. I see no other error
messages. Microsoft memory tests pass and the hard drives seem to pass their
tests as well. It seems to encounter this error when it goes to the hard
drives. It boots fine from a floppy. virus scans, ad and spyware scans all
come back clean. Any ideas?

 

[Roberto]

Occasionally when I reboot my PC, it does not boot up to the Windows XP
screen. Instead it displays a black screen with 7 or 8 strange looking
characters in the upper left hand corner. They look a little like Korean
symbols. At any rate it may take sveral reboots or pulling the power for
a
minute before the system will reboot normally. I see no other error
messages. Microsoft memory tests pass and the hard drives seem to pass
their
tests as well. It seems to encounter this error when it goes to the hard
drives. It boots fine from a floppy. virus scans, ad and spyware scans
all
come back clean. Any ideas?

What you describe are ascii characters, which would indicate you
graphics card is going south

rgds
Roberto

 

[S.Sengupta]

You need to check your graphic card.

regards,
S.Sengupta[MS-MVP]