Ubuntu doesn't recognize my touchpad if I boot with my external drive connected to the USB port. Why would this be the case? Where should I look to start troubleshooting the issue and how can I tell it to not do that anymore? When I have an actual USB mouse plugged in I can use the mouse OR the touchpad so it's not that it thinks the drive is a mouse or anything. The touchpad does not show up in xinput --list
when this happens.
Edit: I am using Ubuntu version 14.04, it is the OS running on the internal drive. I did not mean that I actually booted from the external drive, I mean that I booted my system while the external drive was connected to the USB port. That probably didn't have anything to do with it, it was just the only parameter that was different during this particular boot. The problem is recurring and intermittent. The first time it happened it was upon waking up from pm-hibernate
, subsequently it randomly happens when I boot, it just doesn't detect the touchpad at all.
The only common variable seems to be that it happens when I reboot into Ubuntu from Windows, but again I want to emphasize that may not necessarily be the case. Other times I boot into Ubuntu after being in Windows and the touchpad works fine. It does actually seem unlikely because my notebook has two separate internal SSD's so I am booting Ubuntu/Windows from entirely separate physical disks.
I worked my way through the troubleshooting steps on another post and it did not work. The synclient
program says Couldn't find synaptics properties. No synaptics driver loaded?
. xinput list
lists the USB optical mouse but not the touchpad.
This seems to me like it should be pretty straightforward to troubleshoot. I know the synaptics driver exists because my touchpad works sometimes. So where is it and how do I load it? How can I see a raw list of what input devices are connected to my system, not just the ones that have drivers loaded? Doesn't the kernel check what hardware is present when it boots, and then pass that information to a module that loads drivers? So can't I just manually load the driver?