touchpad is frozen (SOLVED)

[wognath]

EDIT: There was a poor, intermittent connection near the touchpad. Since I repaired it, the touchpad works.

About half the time my touchpad does not work at startup. The cursor will will twitch a bit but there is no controlled movement. I can get a working touchpad either by powering off/on until it works (restart x and reboot are not effective), or by waiting 10-15 minutes (not sure if this works every time).

I haven't changed anything under Control Panel/Adjust Touch Pad. The file /etc/xdg/Startup/touchpad-off is not executable. I use mini initrd. I added waitdev=5 to refind boot options, but it did not help. So far the touchpad hasn't frozen when I start without save file.

Apologies for having an intermittent problem I'd appreciate any suggestions.

Fatdog 814 is installed on an eMMC drive
Kernel: 5.19.17 x86_64
X.Org 1.20.14
HP notebook 14-an013nr
ETPS/2 Elantech Touchpad
xinput properties are in the attachment.

[ozsouth]

@wognath - when I was having touchpad issues during big kernel changes a few months ago, I made a script tpadon to ensure touchpad on. I put it in /root/Startup & made it executable. If you have a savefile/folder, runs on boot. Might help.

[wognath]

This may be a grounding problem. I had opened the computer and pulled loose one of those threaded inserts, near the touchpad. A contact to the backplane also got buggered. I discovered this when I put the SSD back in, and improvised a repair. The touchpad works...so far. I'll mark this as solved after a few more successful reboots.

ozsouth, thanks for that script. If I have any further problems, I'll use it to make sure the touchpad is enabled.