What's wrong with my mac?

[danakm]

I'm starting to freak out because my mac is acting generally strange. These are the symptoms:

• Slow start-up. It takes a while for it to go from blank-screen to Apple logo to the spinning-wheel-thingy

Comments

[ibneko]

The startup chime thing is odd. That is, I believe, the mac indicator of a POST (Power On Self Test) success/failure indicator and I don't believe it cares about hard drive contents.

I'm suspecting a flaky memory chip myself (although I've also seen similar issues when my GPU was dying. But that was back on a much older MacBook Pro, related to this and probably not applicable to you). Steps you could take to eliminate some things:
1) If you have a mac or an external hard drive formatted with the GUID Partition Table (so you can install MacOS X and boot from it), you can boot from that and see how the system behaves. If you see said spinning beach ball of doom / cursor freezing / random apps quitting, it means there's nothing wrong with your hard drive and it's something wrong with other things.

2) Run apple's hardware test: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1509?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US. If you see any failures, that's probably your issues. Take a camera to grab a screenshot, bring it to Apple and ask for help. I hope you bought AppleCare...

3) Run memtest: http://www.memtestosx.org/joomla/index.php (ideally, boot from a linux live-cd and run memtest that way, but this method might be quicker and easier.). Or, start swapping out ram chips and run the system for a while.

[danakm]

I don't seem to be able to make the mac start from hardware test to save my life. I've tried pressing the D key at different moments and for different durations of time to no avail :( Ideas?

Never mind. After trying several suggestions found in Apple forums I finally got one that worked. We'll see how this goes...