Mixed up letters?

[iago]

As much as I hate posting about this kind of thing, this has me stumped! 

I was asked to fix my sister's computer.  It would crash while booting.  So I figured the first thing I'd do is pull out the harddrive and put it in another computer.  So I did that, and it BSOD'd with a useless message.  Great, the harddrive is bad! 

So just to make sure, I put a Linux drive in her computer.  When it starts booting, the text is all... well, the letters are wrong.  Here's a couple pictures (the second one sucks):
http://www.javaop.com/~iago/weirddisplay1.jpg
http://www.javaop.com/~iago/weirddisplay2.jpg

It has all the right words, but the letters are wrong. 

Anybody know what could possibly cause that? 

[Grok]

Linux is a known virus.  If you put this hard drive in a Linux box it is infected and should be thrown into the ocean.  Your ISP has been notified that you are a virus distributor and you will have your internet confiscated.  If not you, then it's your sister.  She must be a virus maker and is a dangerous person.


Actually, what are you calling a Linux drive?  Perhaps an IDE or SATA drive with a linux partition on it?  As far as the "Windows drive" (you didn't specify the OS), you cannot just move a drive between systems and expect them to boot the same.  The load process includes many hardware drivers specific to the system on which the OS was installed.  Can you explain what is happening on the Windows machine?  I'm really not following your troubleshooting process.

However, from the second picture, it looks like your video adapter has faulted and gone into a diagnostic display, which may be interrupting the boot process.

Try disconnecting the hard drive, replace the video card in her PC and booting the computer from a DOS floppy.
If that works, boot to a Windows setup CD, still with the hard drive disconnected.
If that works, remove the Windows setup CD, connect the hard drive and boot.

Afterthought -- if moving the hard drive to a second computer and it faults there too, try running a boot sector virus scan on the drive.  It could be loading code that can write to programmable memory areas in some devices.  To do this, add the questionable hard drive as a second non-booting drive into an existing system.  Since you're not booting to it, you should be able to avoid executing any code in the boot sector.

[Banana fanna fo fanna]

Your BIOS (or vidcard?) might be messed up.