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Bibybakes

macrumors newbie
Aug 8, 2010
1
0
Can't paste/copy or move files across the desktop.

MAC OSX 10.5.8 This is the second time this has happened in a matter of 3 weeks. I was taking a jpeg off my email account (everything was running perfectly) opened photoshop CS4 and it crashed. Tried to open other programmes and they all started to crash. Linotype started to play up and all the fonts on various applications look different than before. All I would say to anyone out there is reinstall from scratch and make sure you have time machine running. It's been an absolute godsend.

I have asked various Mac geeks and searched on line and as yet no-one has heard of it and have had an answer so in many ways it was a relief to find others have had the same problem - albeit I have every sympathy for you all. If anyone out there has an answer I would love to hear from you. As I mentioned before this is the second time it's happened so now I feel I can't trust my Mac anymore so i feel like I'm just wasting my time.
 

Relentlos

macrumors member
Aug 1, 2010
76
0
what an odd issue. I would assume hardware problems if it keeps up, unless you're installing something that is causing it.

Has anyone tried creating a new user account to see if the problem is system-wide?
 

Aranallis

macrumors newbie
Aug 24, 2010
4
0
similar problem

Rather than start a new thread I thought I'd just throw something in here.

Macbook Pro about 2 years old running OS X 10.5.8. About 3 days ago my left command key ceased to function with any of the lower row of keys on my keyboard (z,x,c,v). Having pulled up the on screen keyboard I can see that individually they are working, and when i command+t etc it also works. Right command button is functioning perfectly. Any suggestions?
 

Tumbleweed666

macrumors 68000
Mar 20, 2009
1,761
141
Near London, UK.
Rather than start a new thread I thought I'd just throw something in here.

Macbook Pro about 2 years old running OS X 10.5.8. About 3 days ago my left command key ceased to function with any of the lower row of keys on my keyboard (z,x,c,v). Having pulled up the on screen keyboard I can see that individually they are working, and when i command+t etc it also works. Right command button is functioning perfectly. Any suggestions?

Start a new thread
 

victoral.com

macrumors newbie
Feb 23, 2011
6
0
Puerto Rico
Rather than start a new thread I thought I'd just throw something in here.

Macbook Pro about 2 years old running OS X 10.5.8. About 3 days ago my left command key ceased to function with any of the lower row of keys on my keyboard (z,x,c,v). Having pulled up the on screen keyboard I can see that individually they are working, and when i command+t etc it also works. Right command button is functioning perfectly. Any suggestions?

Just do What I did.

Aperantly the problem has to do with the /private/tmp directory.

Just make sure it exists and has the right permissions.

1. To check, in the Finder click Go > Go to Folder... and in the dialog type in /private

if you see the folder "tmp" then don't do the this step. If you don't see it then do this in the Terminal. Located in /Applications/Utilities/, type in

sudo mkdir /private/tmp

enter your password then go to the next step.

2. Set permissions this one is easy just type this in terminal

sudo chmod 1777 /private/tmp

and enter your password and then just reboot. If you can drag and drop and copy/paste then the problem has been fixed.


This worked for me so I hope it does for you.
 

MacCracken

macrumors newbie
Mar 22, 2011
2
0
California
Add me to the LIST....

:(:(:(

I have explained this exact problem for almost two weeks...

DOES ANYONE KNOW WHY!!!!!

DOES ANYONE HAVE A FIX FOR THIS!!!!

:confused::confused::confused:
 

CheeseConCheese

macrumors newbie
Jul 23, 2011
2
0
Same deal, Have a macbook from 06 put tiger updated to 10.6.8. Been on 10.6 for about 7 months. Another thing I noticed was in word trying to copy text a message will pop up and say "there is not enough mem or disk space to complete operation" I have 1gb MHz SDRAM and about 40 gigs of space.

Another issue about the random shut offs, if there's any audio playing it goes into about a sec long loop repeat, a grey-dimm slides down the screen, with a message to shut down in 5 languages and a power button in the backround or something
 

kerynl

macrumors newbie
Sep 22, 2011
1
0
having the same issue since erase and install

had to completely erase and reinstall my os. mac os x, version 10.6.8 if that helps. i am no longer able to right click on highlighted text and copy it. in fact, i can't right click to delete items, pull up their menus, etc. if you find out anything please pass it along.

thanks,

k
 

rhett7660

macrumors G5
Jan 9, 2008
14,219
4,294
Sunny, Southern California
had to completely erase and reinstall my os. mac os x, version 10.6.8 if that helps. i am no longer able to right click on highlighted text and copy it. in fact, i can't right click to delete items, pull up their menus, etc. if you find out anything please pass it along.

thanks,

k

Did you go under settings and re-enable the right click on the mouse. The defualt is no right click.

Preferences>>Mouse>>Enable right click. Since you said you had to reinstall the OS I am assuming you didn't do this.
 

bahramsherwani

macrumors newbie
Dec 22, 2011
2
0
Just do What I did.

Aperantly the problem has to do with the /private/tmp directory.

Just make sure it exists and has the right permissions.

1. To check, in the Finder click Go > Go to Folder... and in the dialog type in /private

if you see the folder "tmp" then don't do the this step. If you don't see it then do this in the Terminal. Located in /Applications/Utilities/, type in

sudo mkdir /private/tmp

enter your password then go to the next step.

2. Set permissions this one is easy just type this in terminal

sudo chmod 1777 /private/tmp

and enter your password and then just reboot. If you can drag and drop and copy/paste then the problem has been fixed.


This worked for me so I hope it does for you.

After step 1, it won't let me enter my password. No matter what I type, nothing happens and when I click enter, It acts as though I didn't enter anything...
 

kimmied

macrumors newbie
Mar 5, 2012
1
0
i cannot copy photos off my mac onto external hd

Please help
for some crazy reason i cannot transfer my photos from my new mac onto my external hd.

Originally tried to do it straight from iPhoto by highlighting the photos and dragging and dropping- but no luck.

so then i thought maybe its because of iPhoto so i copied them out of iPhoto into a folder on my desktop ( that worked fine)

so then tried to drag and drop from the folder but just won't paste, drop or copy into/onto the hd!

its doing my head in so any suggestions will help please.
 

OSX-SUX

macrumors newbie
Mar 19, 2010
27
0
I am having the same problem with copy and paste. I can copy and paste to a network drive no problem, but it was taking too long to copy my 40GB iPhoto Originals folder on Snow Leopard. So I plugged the drive directly USB into the Mac Mini and now I can't paste (seems to copy) as there is no option. Dragging and dropping something like this is dangerous and cumbersome, esp while having to hold down a key on a wireless keyboard. Any help is appreciated. I can't understand how "think different" has to be so different that it makes it completely unusable. I spend hours trying to do what takes minutes on an intuitive, normal machine. I am trying to be a "switcher" but I keep hitting these unexplainable brick walls in usability. Hence why I am trying to get my photos off of the Mac entirely.
 

bonniebooni

macrumors newbie
Mar 11, 2012
1
0
I know how to solve the problem

I just had the same problem too, but luckily I found the way to solve it. Just right click your trackpad on the screen--> get info-->sharing & permission--> +(add)--> yourself(your login username)-->under privilege choose read & write. Do it for both screen and any files is fine.:)
 

virenag

macrumors newbie
Aug 19, 2012
1
0
Problem with cut/paste and Drag/Drop not working in Mac OS X

Get to X utilities Terminal window via Finder->GO->...

Type following UNIX commands in the window.

ls -ld /tmp

It should display following:
rwxrwxrwt root wheel /tmp

If it does not exist then type following Unix commands.

su - root
<enter root password>

mkdir /tmp;


chown root:wheel /tmp
chmod 1777 /tmp

Reboot the machine. That should fix it.
It can happen if you accidently delete /tmp or /private/tmp directory.
 

jpvand1

macrumors newbie
Sep 1, 2009
4
0
Just do What I did.

Aperantly the problem has to do with the /private/tmp directory.

Just make sure it exists and has the right permissions.

1. To check, in the Finder click Go > Go to Folder... and in the dialog type in /private

if you see the folder "tmp" then don't do the this step. If you don't see it then do this in the Terminal. Located in /Applications/Utilities/, type in

sudo mkdir /private/tmp

enter your password then go to the next step.

2. Set permissions this one is easy just type this in terminal

sudo chmod 1777 /private/tmp

and enter your password and then just reboot. If you can drag and drop and copy/paste then the problem has been fixed.


This worked for me so I hope it does for you.

Just an update to this issue...victoral.com's FIX WORKS for OS 10.7! It was the permissions.

THANK YOU!!!
 

whitedog

macrumors newbie
Jul 9, 2010
14
7
Northern California
A solution short of the last resort

It may be too late to help the original contributors to this thread, as this is an old story. But the problem, in one form or another, still comes up, as I recently found. After extensive troubleshooting, I remembered a solution - though I never found the root cause of the problems. I post my answer here now so that others coming late to this forum, as I did, will have another solution to try.

I have a friend who was having much the same trouble on her MacBook Pro running OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard as described on this forum. She could not drag & drop files - though she could move windows around by the title bar, so it was not a malfunction of the click-hold function of the trackpad. The same problem accrued when using a mouse. In addition, copy and paste did not work - or, more accurately, past did not work. The Copy function was still available in the Edit menu, while Paste was always grayed out.

Further, no application showed the fonts in her user Fonts folder - even after repairing ACSs. I installed the old, free version of Linotype Font Explorer and, as with Font Book, the user fonts were not shown. Or rather, they were listed but displayed as not available. In Font Book they didn’t show at all. Nor were they available in Photoshop or Illustrator.

None of the standard repair procedures made any difference, not even Disk Warrior. The temp folder, as described in other posts, was extant. But repairing permissions on that folder didn’t help. After creating a new admin user account the problems were still there. However, when I booted from an external hard drive with a separate copy of OS X, none of the problems showed up. I concluded, from all this, that the source of the trouble was not a hardware problem or a flaw in her user account. It was some kind of corruption in the main system somewhere.

A common restorative, reinstalling the OS X 10.6.8 combo update, didn’t work in this case. But before defaulting to the last resort solution of doing a clean install, I remembered that reinstalling the base OS, in this case OS X 10.6.0, over the existing system was occasionally effective in fixing obscure problems. It has the added advantage of not requiring reinstalling applications, recreating accounts and settings, or migrating data from a backup (though I did do a clone back up of her system using SuperDuper! as a precaution). Fortunately I had an OS X Snow Leopard install disc on hand. The only caveat is that I had to use an external DVD drive to boot from the disc as Snow Leopard came on a dual layer DVD - and the optical drive on her old MacBook Pro doesn’t support dual layer DVDs.

Well, this turned out to be the right solution. I updated to OS X 10.6.8 once more and the system was as good as new. Thus two days of grueling troubleshooting had a happy ending. :)
 

N64

macrumors regular
Dec 24, 2013
161
0
Lost Woods
Get to X utilities Terminal window via Finder->GO->...

Type following UNIX commands in the window.

ls -ld /tmp

It should display following:
rwxrwxrwt root wheel /tmp

If it does not exist then type following Unix commands.

su - root
<enter root password>

mkdir /tmp;


chown root:wheel /tmp
chmod 1777 /tmp

Reboot the machine. That should fix it.
It can happen if you accidently delete /tmp or /private/tmp directory.

I ran into the problem. I actually already had the tmp directory, but its permissions were messed up (oddly right after I did a permissions repair). Doing the chmod commands you specified worked here in 10.9. Thank you so much. This totally saved me because I'm copying over a lot of text right now.
 

apsuresh2009

macrumors newbie
Oct 21, 2014
1
0
Cant Copy \ Paste to External Drive

Am facing the same problem that everyone else has reported. Have tried to check on the existence of the tmp folder as suggested earlier. The folder exists but then the next step is not clear. Any suggestions to resolve this problem will be of immense help. Am into photography in a big way and all my RAW files take up a lot of space and need urgently to transfer them to the Hard Disk
 

TonyCostanzo2015

macrumors newbie
Nov 19, 2015
1
0
Well since I can't drag and drop, I also found out that I can't copy and paste! Any help please?

Imac 2008 early 6GB Ram, upgraded to El Capitan, now I can not copy and paste with mouse or do spell check..
 
Last edited by a moderator:

Lala_03

macrumors newbie
Nov 26, 2017
1
0
Well since I can't drag and drop, I also found out that I can't copy and paste! Any help please?


Here's how I solved my problem.
go to the ff:
-system preferences
-mouse
-point & click (check)
or click all the boxes if you want.
Dwalaaaaa! I was able to copy and paste:))))))
 
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