Just to check, does "locale -c charmap" return UTF-8? If yes, then it seems there is an issue with your default console font (I assume you didn't put anything like this on the kernel command line). So, try changing the console font either by the kernel cmdline or at runtime in a tty console: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fonts#Console_fonts .

Also, what is your graphics card, and how do you load the graphics driver (automatically, early in ramdisk via MODULES= in mkinitcpio.conf, etc.)? Try booting with nomodeset at the kernel cmdline to disable KMS and see if your fonts get back to normal...

Cheers, -- Leonid Isaev

locale -c charmap" returns lc_ctype UTF-8 my graphics card is a cirrus logic cl-gd5436 pci 1mb vga card it's loaded automatically, have tried adding nomodeset by pressing e at the boot screen with brings me to grub startup file i added nomodeset to the end of the 'linux /boot/vmlinux' line but no change. i got further by pressing e at boot and changing the GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX to GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=text and the console screen displayed correctly, to make it permenant i edited /etc/default/grub and also changed the GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX line there but upon reboot i was back to the previous block characters. so i can get a correct display if i press e and edit from there on each bootup, is there another entry i should have comment , uncommented or added in /etc/default/grub to make it permenant ? shadrock