Touchpad not recognized anymore on Asus laptop, probably not a software issue

Visitor108

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Jan 28, 2016
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Hello everyone :)

Some days ago I bought a caddy to fit a second HDD in the optical drive bay, so I disassembled my Asus laptop (in this process you have to detach the touchpad's cable from its socket), installed the caddy and mounted everything back. It seemed to work fine, and since I usually use a USB mouse when I'm at home, I didn't bother to check if the touchpad was working.

Some time later I realized instead that it didn't respond anymore, and that Windows didn't even show the cursor after the boot if the USB mouse wasn't plugged in. I thought it was something trivial like I had accidentally hit FN+F9 (the key combination to turn the touchpad off on my laptop), but it came out that Windows wouldn't even recognize the trackpad at all, as if it was unplugged from the motherboard.

I then tried to see if Arch Linux would recognize it instead, but with no luck. I ran lspci but there was no entry about the touchpad. Thinking I could have not mounted the cable properly, I then disassembled the laptop again and tried to fit the loose end of the cable in the socket in a variety of angulations, depths etc., but it still wouldn't work. The last thing I did was to mount the cable and test every pin (the ends on the rear of the sockets, soldered to the motherboard and to the trackpad respectively) with a multimeter, and guess what? Everything worked, there were no obstructions and the signal should pass with no problem.

Is there something else I can do to test if this is not a software issue? It seems strange to me that my trackpad is not working anymore after only a couple of months since I bought it.

Thanks in advance!
 
Solution
The interface items like touchpad, keyboard, etc.. are listed as an HID devices (human interface device) if detected, but I don't know if that will show you just the connection on the motherboard as working but just nothing connected to it, that may be something different, if anything.

Visitor108

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Jan 28, 2016
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4,510

Yes, there is an option to turn the touchpad on or off in the BIOS, but it was set to "enabled"; I tried switching it off, rebooting and then switching it on again, but nothing changed.

Is there a way to see if the system is "waiting" for the touchpad to be connected, like the USB ports are listed in the device manager as "USB Host" even if there's nothing plugged in? That way I could spot if the problem is in the mainboard or if I should focus on the trackpad.
 
The interface items like touchpad, keyboard, etc.. are listed as an HID devices (human interface device) if detected, but I don't know if that will show you just the connection on the motherboard as working but just nothing connected to it, that may be something different, if anything.
 
Solution