vmWare Workstation - unable to drag and drop or copy and paste

Solution 1:

My VMware host is a Windows 7 machine, and I'm running Workstation 10.

This has worked for me on several VMs where I had the same problem, including my Windows 10 VM:

1. Completely shut down the VM on which you want to change the settings, close all other VMs that you have open, and exit out of VMware.
2. Start VMware by clicking 'Run as Administrator'.
3. Before starting the VM, disable both 'Enable drag and drop' and 'Enable copy and paste' in the VM's 'Guest Isolation' setting on the Options tab.
4. Exit from the settings GUI.
5. Do step 3 again but enable them instead.
6. Start the VM. This should allow the copy and paste to work.

Sometimes I've had to follow these steps a few times before it would work, but this ultimately solved the problem each time I tried it.

Solution 2:

I noticed there is an incompatibility with Wayland when Copy-Paste files into VM desktop when using GDM.

To fix that (remove Wayland) edit your custom configuration file

/etc/gdm3/custom.conf

or

/etc/gdm/custom.conf

replace comment char '#' from the line:

#WaylandEnable=false

to:

WaylandEnable=false

save file and reboot!