Elantech touchpad randomly stops working

General system Kernel, boot, graphics & hardware
1

Hi all, my laptop’s touchpad will randomly stop working, happens once every few hours. When it happens, nothing helps except a reboot. Closing and reopening the laptop’s lid (which puts it to sleep) doesn’t get the touchpad working again.

I have also tried typing “xinput --list” to get my touchpad id then typing “xinput disable 12” followed by “xinput enable 12” and this doesn’t help. If I plug in a usb mouse while the touchpad is nonworking, the usb mouse works fine.

Also note that when this happens, the click on the touchpad still works, it’s just the scrolling that doesn’t work. By the way previously I was using Mint for 2 years on this laptop (also the xfce version) and never had this problem once.

I wonder if uninstalling the elantech driver and trying the synaptics driver would solve it? Or would this not work with an elantech touchpad? Anyone else got any ideas?

2

You could try some kernel parameters. Here are a couple to try. Just add them to the default grub command line and then update grub.

i8042.nopnp=1 pci=nocrs
3

Thanks I’ll try that. Btw what exactly do those do?

4

These are just a few. There are many kernel parameters.

i8042.nopnp	[HW] Don't use ACPIPnP / PnPBIOS to discover KBD/AUX
			     controllers

pci=nocrs 		[X86] Ignore PCI host bridge windows from ACPI.
				If you need to use this, please report a bug.

Edit: Just add them to the command line in

/etc/default/grub

Then update grub

sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

If they don’t work or cause any other problem you can remove them and update grub again and then try some others if needed.

5

Thanks Rick it hasn’t stopped working since I did that but it could be just a coincidence, I appreciate the help.

6

Well let us know…

7

Dang it didn’t work. :frowning: didn’t happen for a few days then suddenly happens several times in an hour. I guess I can try some other parameters.

One thing I noticed is that it will actually start working again on its own, sometimes it takes a few minutes and other times a bit longer, there’s no way to know, so it’s faster to just reboot.

I’m guessing it’s a bug in the elantech driver.

8

Maybe try these ones?

i8042.nomux=1 i8042.reset