Synaptic touchpad is not detected on boot, rather, after restart

Question

I recently installed Ubuntu 16.04 on my Lenovo Twist, however, the touchpad does not work when I first boot the computer from shutdown. After I restart the computer, the touchpad works. How can I get the touchpad to work when I boot Ubuntu? Do I need to configure something in the Bios?

For clarification, when I run xinput on startup/boot, I do not see the SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad and the TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint. Rather, when I restart my computer (not from shutdown), xinput shows both.

I have uninstalled the synaptics driver, which resulted in no touchpad behavior even after a restart. So I then reinstalled it which then produced the above behavior again.

I changed the grub file multiple times under the line GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT= to the following with no fix:

• quiet splash i8042.nopnp
• i8042.reset quiet splash
• quiet splash i8042.kbdreset=1 i8042.nomux=1 i8042.reset
• quiet splash i8042.kbdreset=1
• quiet splash i8042.reset i8042.nomux=1
• quiet splash i8042.reset
• quiet splash i8042.nomux i8042.reset=1
• quiet splash i8042.nomux
• quiet splash i8042.reset i8042.nomux i8042.nopnp i8042.noloop
• i8042.nomux=1 locale=fr_FR i8042.reset

I have blacklisted i2c_hid and commented out i2c_i801 from /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf with no results.

I followed the instructions from the following links to no avail:

1. Dell Inspiron 3551 Unresponsive Touchpad
2. Touchpad not working after suspend Ubuntu 16.04
3. Touchpad under 16.04 not working
4. Touchpad doesn't work on startup but does on reboot
5. Touchpad/Keyboard problems
6. Touchpad is not recognized

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Previously, I replaced my hard drive and removed dual-boot from my computer, consequently, I installed two grub loaders and two operating systems. I believe that caused the issue because I suspect that the grub file I was editing was not updating the grub.conf that the computer was using to boot/reboot the OS.

To solve this issue, I removed all grub boot loaders and Ubuntu OS from my computer and then reinstalled Ubuntu 16.04. After a fresh install and before I updated Ubuntu, I edited the /etc/default/grub file and replaced

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

with

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash i8042.reset i8042.nomux i8042.nopnp i8042.noloop"

followed by a

sudo update-grub.

After catching and fixing my weird issue, the old solutions solved my problem. Before updating grub, ensure that there are no multiple grub boot loaders installed on different hard drives on your computer.