Only working in Safe Mode

And another. At first I had a weird pixelated screen, then it would just get stuck on a blue screen. I did lots of pram resetting and every other thing I could think of. It would not start from the supplied techtool deluxe cd that came with the apple protection plan, but it did start from the install disk, so I archived and reinstalled, but that froze up near the end. I then ran the hardware checker (option key on reboot with cd 1 in) and that all checked out. I then restarted in safe mode and it asked for the second cd. Got through the whole process and now it is running and I'm going to backup everything before I see if it will start not in safe mode, but my hopes are not high.

What's up with this?

Here's something to try. There are a number of kernel (system) extensions that are not loaded in Safe Mode. You can try removing them one at a time as mentioned in a comment above.

OR

you can boot into Safe Mode and then try adding them to see which ones are not good.
To do this, boot into Safe mode, open terminal and either type the following or create a bash shell script with the following commands:

for file in `ls /System/Library/Extensions/*.kext`
do
echo $file
sudo kextload /System/Library/Extensions/$file
done

A whole lot of messages will appear on the screen. Scroll back up the terminal window (or command-F to find the word "failed". Some of the extensions presumably failed. Then you know what part of te hardware is giving trouble. You can move these extension files out of /System/Library/Extensions and if lucky be abe to boot into normal mode--but your system won't be fully working until you get the hardware that those extensions use fixed.

In my case it is the ApplePMU extension. Sounds like the power management system is faulty.
Dan

Mine starting doing it yesterday. I first noticed the problem under normal mode when nothing responded to the cursor, and when I tried restarting, it stuck on a solid blue screen. After reading about safe mode, I tried that, and it works, but even booting from an external disk requires safe mode, so I knew something with the hardware must be wrong.

I'd like to know if anyone comes up with a common solution.