Hardware Diagnostics

[AgaBoogaBoo]

I'm getting random problems like sometimes Mail doesn't close without a forced termination, Preview can't open and keeps bouncing for an extended period of time, the computer will hang up, etc.

I think I'm having trouble with my external HDD that I use for Time Machine and so I can't rule that out, but I wanted to run diagnostics on my MBP (13" 2009) to see if the first issue is independent of the external drive. I don't have the discs that came with my laptop and so I can't use those to boot into apple's diagnostic tools by holding D during boot up.

Is there another way to get access to those tools?

 

[Emulex]

yah

terminal
sudo dmesg |more

i had a issue where a bad sector on the drive caused a 10 minute wake up from sleep - it was there after the wifi came back online - bad sector messages.

dmesg contains critical info but that may be in several other log files in /var/log (make sure you are root)

terminal
sudo su -
tail -500 /var/log/messages |more
or
tail -f /var/log/messages

-500 = last 500 lines, -f keep tailing the messages as they come out.