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. Click to expand.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. To check, in the Finder click Go Go to Folder.
Apr 13, 2017 - How to copy and paste on a Mac. Highlight your desired text by clicking and dragging with your cursor; Right click on the highlighted text. Using copy and paste is a routine part of most peoples Mac workflow, so if suddenly the Copy and Paste feature stops working or the clipboard appears stuck, you can imagine why that’s annoying.
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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 didnt 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 didnt 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, didnt 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 doesnt 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.
Mac and Windows devices feel completely different and their OSes aren’t all that similar. This leads to it being a bit tougher than it should be to go from one kind of device to the other. Fortunately, there are some basic things that can have a skill from Windows transfer over to MacOS – or vice versa. Copying and pasting is a simple tool, but one that makes life easier. To do copy and paste on a Mac, just select the object and press Command alongside C to copy it. Then pick where you want that text to go once again and press Command alongside V to paste it. It’s the same as using Control + C or Control + V on Windows, but instead on Mac you’re using Command + C or Command + V.
Some might get a little confused, as Mac is essentially a glorified Linux platform underneath. So, to your surprise, that means that on other Linux platforms, such as Ubuntu or openSUSE, you’re not going to have a Command + C or Command + V to use. It’s the same as on Windows: Control + C and Control + V.
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