Sony Vaio will only boot in safe mode

[Banzai_Joe]

Hi all,
guy at work passed this to me. His lads sony vaio will only boot successfully into safe mode. If i choose continue booting into windows or whatever it says (Vista HP btw) i see the windows logo, then a black screen with the white mouse arrow.....forever!
So i re-boot into safe, it seems to stick for a while after loading crcdisk.sys, but then boots into windows.
There are no device manager issues.

My initial feeling was that it was graphics driver related, but what's the best way to troubleshoot this?
Having had similar on xp machines, it wasn't specifically the windows graphics drivers, but the chipset drivers pre-windows if you know what i mean, whereas copying certain agp driver files from an xp disk was an option to try and fix it. (can't remember if it did or not now, long time ago).
There is a recovery partition in Computer Management, but as yet, i don't have any recovery disks to use (can ask the owner though).

Any advice appreciated, thanks

 

[beermonster]

You can try pulling some drivers in safe mode and see what happens, failing that you can do a factory recovery using F11 on start up.

 

[iaind]

Check the event log for errors or indications of what might be happening, or at least starting before it freezes.

Disable services and startup items that might not be necessary.

Alternatively, try a system recovery before resorting to a factory rebuild.