Unable to drag and drop to desktop

Hi,

I don't know what changed, but I am unable to drag and drop anything to my desktop.

I would sure appreciate some suggestions. Thank you very much. Murray

What happens when you try? Do the icons just jump back to where they were in their own window?

What kind of Mac? Are you using a mouse? If so, do you have another mouse that you could try?

Hello toMACsh, Yes, the icons or URL pop off the desk top with the dreaded 0 with the slash through it. I have tried to drag it into a different folder onto the desk top and that also fails. I have checked through my settings thinking that there must be a check in something but I am unable to find the culprit causing this situation. I have gone into my track pad settings and the check is in for drag and drop so I haven't a clue as to what to do or un-do at this point. Any suggestions? I am running Mac Specs: 17" MacBook Pro 2.5 GHz Intel i7 OS X 10.8.2 Model Late 2011 8,3. No, I do not have a mouse available for use. Thank you for any help you might be able to offer. Murray

This is something of a shot in the dark but try the following and let us know the results:

1. Open your user folder (the one that looks like a house).
2 Find the "Desktop folder and do the Get Info command
3, Look at the Sharing and Permissions section. You may need to click the triangle next to it to see the contents.

Let us know the results. If your user does not have read/writer permissions that could cause this problem.

BTW do you get this problem if you try to drag files to places other than the desktop?

Hello Slydude, you are my hero. I did as you suggested. It had permission to read and write so I took the check out and then I put it back in and it now drags and drops. I didn't think it would work since it showed up as it should with permission so I just took a chance to see if it made a difference. It did! I wonder what caused the glitch, but I really don't care at this point because it is working again. Thank you, thank you. Murray

Glad that sorted things out. If you are having that problem with other folders it might be worth launching Disk Utility, selecting the drive, and performing a permission repair.

Thanks Slydude. Not to seem dumb, but where do I find the Disk Utility so that I can launch it? I have performed cleanup services with Clean My Mac. Would this be the same thing? I don't see anything with it to do any permission repairs unless it came up with a found problem, which it didn't. Murray

Hi

Launch Finder, Click on Apps, Scroll down to Utilities, Click on it and Disk Utilities is in there.

When launched, Disk Utilities brings up all mounted Disks on the left. Your Internal Hard Drive will be shown there probably as "Macintosh HD". Click on this and towards the right and lower down will be "Repair Disk Permissions". Click on this and be patient because if could take some time if you've not done this before.

As regards "cleaning apps", many in the Forum use and recommend the free OnyX. Google it to find the download site. If you choose to download it, make certain that you download the version appropriate to your OS. Leopard, Snow Leopard, Lion & Mountain Lion need their own version of OnyX. OnyX checks your IHD and you can run automated clean-up operations.

Hope all this helps.

Ian

Murray1446 said:

I have performed cleanup services with Clean My Mac. Would this be the same thing?

Click to expand...

No, but it's possible that doing this caused the problem in the first place. You should probably uninstall Clean My Mac. I'm not sure if it has its own uninstaller, but if it does, use it.

Thanks Ian, I ran the disk repair and it said it cleaned up an error in the library. I will check into the OnyX program. It is worth trying it out for sure. Thank you, Murray

toMACish. That is quite possible, as I had run it just last week and now this week I couldn't drag and drop. I don't know if the problem existed last week or not because I hadn't tried to do it back then. I know that sometimes these kinds of programs throw things out of whack from time to time. I had one that used to throw out my printer every time I ran it to clean up. I think I will give the OnyX a shot as Ian suggested. Thanks, Murray

Although many on the forum routinely run permission repair weekly or monthly. I don'y unless I am experiencing issues such as the one you are having.

Others may not agree but I rarely run maintenance utilities in general. When I do I tend to use something like Onyx,

Alternative Fix

Hi all,
My mother also had this problem recently, and this is how I fixed it:
- Make a new folder anywhere apart from the desktop, and drag the contents of your desktop into it
- Open Terminal and run the command: sudo rm -r Desktop
- Open the force quit menu and relaunch Finder
- Drag your desktop from the folder we made earlier back onto your desktop

Since this appears to be a permissions error with the desktop folder, I see no problem in simply creating a new one. Obviously, this won't be a permanent fix as the error could occur again, but such a thing probably doesn't exist in my opinion...
Hope this helps!