Submit Hint Search The Forums LinksStatsPollsHeadlinesRSS
14,000 hints and counting!


Click here to return to the 'Fix broken drag and drop in 10.2.6' hint
The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.
Fix broken drag and drop in 10.2.6
Authored by: bluehz on Jun 05, '03 01:30:03PM
This is a known problem. The solution is simply to delete the icon cache found in /Library/Caches/ whose name is "com.apple.dock.iconcache.#USERNAME#"

I wish I remembered where I clipped this from so I could give proper credit... but I didn't ref it properly in my notes...sorry

OS X: coreservicesd crashing, icons not moving

This message is in response to various reader reports where, after some issue (e.g. applications crashing) no icons on the Mac's desktop can be moved.

This has happened to me more than once, and has also happened in systems pre 10.2.

In all cases this was due to the crashing of a system daemon called coreservicesd. In pre 10.2 systems the Mac won't boot at all. Logging in remotely and killing coreservicesd (which would use a lot of processor time) would continue the boot process, but icons wouldn't be movable and the clipboard wouldn't work.

In pre 10.2 systems the problem is solved by trashing the LS databases in ~/Library/Preferences/ but beware that some internet preferences (default browser) are also lost by trashing these databases.

In 10.2 and 10.2.1 simply trash the icon cache found in /Library/Caches/ whose name is "com.apple.dock.iconcache.". Or simply trash the complete Caches directory. If the system won't boot, start in single user mode to delete those items. After removing these the system will usually be fine again.



[ Reply to This | # ]
Fix broken drag and drop in 10.2.6
Authored by: Han Solo on Jun 06, '03 10:52:21AM

I don't know about this exact text, but it appears to resemble a discussion on Macintouch several months back. I too ran into this problem (with 10.2.3), and deleting the iconcache file (as well as several others recommended there) only temporarily "solved" the problem -- in the end, I too had to reinstall from the combo updater. After that, the problem has not (yet) returned. (Knock on particle board....) As always, YMMV.



[ Reply to This | # ]
Fix broken drag and drop in 10.2.6: beware...
Authored by: tinker on Jul 19, '03 07:12:51PM

I ran into this problem (drag and drop not working) yesterday. I tried reinstalling the 10.2.6 comprehensive upgrade -- no dice. I tried deleting com.apple.dock.iconcache.myname, still no dice. I tried trashing the whole Caches directory; when I rebooted, all of the icons were generic, either dog-eared paper or folders -- documents couldn't identify their applications -- and I still couldn't drag and drop anything. Tried booting in single-user mode and fsck -y -ing a few times, then rebooting. Nada. It was also starting to engage in some very strange behavior: not showing the moving bar and giving details about what it was doing on startup, for example. Then it asked me for my username and password and wouldn't let me in. At that point I figured I was done for. Fortunately, a reboot fixed that... this time.

(I can sense the reader thinking, Good God, man, back the thing up -- you're going down! I'm getting there....)

Tried one more 10.2.6 comprehensive install. Nothing. Finally, out of curiosity, I copied /Library/Caches/ from my most recent backup (I knew there was a reason I backed up /Library), rebooted, and, thank God, I've at least got icons back, documents recognize their applications, etc. -- except for the ones I installed very recently, which are still generic.

NOW I'm backing up, and writing this on a different machine. I have no idea what's causing the drag problem, still (any suggestions welcome!!), and I'm a bit worried that I'm not getting startup info, but I'd say that trashing the entire Cache directory was definitely a step in the wrong direction. Caveat lector....



[ Reply to This | # ]
DON'T DO THAT!!!
Authored by: cparnot on Nov 11, '03 11:53:17PM

I am not saying that deleting those cache files will never work, but it can also make things worse. Here comes another example to add to the various comments of this thread...

I had that problem of broken drag-and-drop (no problem with copy and paste), and no process 'coreservicesd' running (but process 'pbs' all right, so copy and paste definitely seems to be a separate problem).

I did just what is said here, ie delete the cache files described in this post, thinking that Cache files are anyway meant to be deleted at some point, right?

Oups... After restarting, I got that little black wheel spinning forever (I waited at least 15 minutes). After force-rebooting on my OS 9 partition, I had a very nasty message, something like: "cannot mount the 'OS X' partition. Do you want to initialize your disk?" NO!!! I was not able to get it back with the Disk Utility on the Jaguar CD. Finally, Norton Was able to fix the Catalog Tree stuff, whatever that is. At least, I could read and back up the partition.

The drag-and-drop was not fixed, though. However, after running the X.2.8 combo installation (why did not I do that in the first place!!), the computer was back to its normal behavior. Pfou...

Conclusion: don't touch those Cache file without great caution; they might sometimes be corrupted but in other cases, they might actually be helping when something else is wrong.
(this is my interpretation)

---
charles



[ Reply to This | # ]