[FIX] ELan touchpad stops working at boot

There was this issue that I faced in my system (HP Pavilion Gaming 15 Laptop) in which the touchpad (ElanTech) would stop working when the laptop booted, the fix to which was to move my finger on the touchpad when the system was booting up. Doing this every time was not convenient, so it took me a while, but this is what I did.

Create a script, called touchpadrestart.sh and put the below code in it.

#!/bin/sh
rmmod i2c_hid && modprobe i2c_hid

Make sure the touchpadrestart script is in your path. What the code does is, it disables the driver for the touchpad, and then enables it again. Put this in the path and run it whenever you need your touchpad to start working again. But this solution itself is not very efficient as it needs root access to run. We can make the process more streamlined by turning this into a systemd service.

First create the file /etc/systemd/system/touchpadrestart.service. After that, make sure the path in ExecStart points to our script.

[Unit]
Description=TouchPad Restart

[Service]
User=root
Type=oneshot
ExecStart="/usr/local/bin/touchpadrestart.sh"

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Once this file is saved, all you need to do is start and enable the service.

# systemctl start touchpadrestart

# systemctl enable touchpadrestart

That’s it! Quick and easy fix. (For touchpads other than this one, you can find the device driver name using lspci and change it in the script. )