Windows Vista Forum / Vista Technical / Recovery & Backup / Restoring Vista fonts / Latest Posts

RE: Restoring Vista fonts

WAW8 — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 08:41:36 GMT

Vista stores backups of the fonts in the Windows\winsxs folder -- which is read by sfc /scannow -- which is why that is used to recovery fonts. Unlike with XP, Vista is not distributed as a bunch of .CAB files, so you can't just open a .CAB file on the DVD and export fonts.

You can look at the log file in Windows\logs\CBS to see what happened when you ran the sfc stuff, but you have to be the real Administrator to do that, and you have to unhide the Admin account first to be able to login as the real Admin.

If you did the sfc stuff and was unable to re-register the fonts, a reinstallation is the only way to get them back.

RE: Restoring Vista fonts

snapydj — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 04:28:18 GMT

No... u don't understand.. the arial font and times new roman etc are not in windows/fonts... they're gone :) i tried you're method but isn't working because i don't have the fonts :-??

RE: Restoring Vista fonts

WAW8 — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 13:18:21 GMT

Short of a full reinstallation, the SFC /scannow is the only way to restore Vista fonts.

If you did that, and they are not showing up, it's because you didn't re-register the fonts after recovery.

Do that as follows:
1) Goto to Control Panel --> Fonts
2) Right-click and select Install Font
3) Select C:\Windows\Fonts and select all
4) Select install

Vista will re-register all the fonts, including the ones you just restored.

RE: Restoring Vista fonts

snapydj — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 07:42:40 GMT

Hi. I tried this way but i cand't solve nothing... my arial (regular) and times new roman fonts are dissapeared.. :|..

Restoring Vista fonts

WAW8 — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 09:45:54 GMT

We've been getting posts about folks having removed some fonts from Vista and now, they want to restore them. Under XP, you inserted the CD and used the Control Panel to locate the font files and restore them. But under Vista, the DVD doesn't contain individual font files or .CAB files anymore; instead, it contains compressed Windows Image files. So, the procedure is quite different.

However - there is both good news and bad news. Good news is that you can restore the default Windows fonts with a simple command. Bad news is that it's likely to reset your system files back to the state they were in when Vista was first installed, meaning, that there's a risk that ALL windows updates will be lost and have to be reapplied. That's because the operation restores ALL of your Vista system files to their original state, not some of them, and you can't choose which ones to restore.

To do this "fix", you do the following:
1) Open a command window with elevated rights: Enter "cmd" in the start menu, press Ctl-Shift-Enter, click OK on the UAC prompt.
2) In the command window, enter "sfc /scannow". This will scan ALL the windows system files and replace them with the original. It's very likely that it will prompt you to insert the original Vista DVD -- so it can uncompress the original image file and rewrite the system files from that.

The reason I say "very likely" is twofold. First, because I have NOT done this and don't know for sure what it will prompt you for, and second, Vista stores some system stuff when it does the installation. Don't know if it stores enough stuff such that it doesn't require the original DVD to restore the fonts folder.

So, unfortunately, this is a "use at your own risk" activity. Sorry.