This has been a thorn in my side for quite a while with ANY flavor of Linux I try installing on this laptop. It's an HP Pavilion Gaming Laptop 15-ec0013dx. Pretty much everything installs fine on the laptop EXCEPT the touchpad. I've gone through the tests I've seen on other sites and the pad is detected. I try editing GRUB and that also doesn't work. What DOES work, which seems odd, is if I go into my Boot Manager to choose what drive/partition to boot from and choose the locally installed Zorin, it boots and the touchpad works without a hitch. But I have to go through the boot manager every time I want to use the touch pad, otherwise if it boots straight to GRUB I have to plug in a mouse.
It's like there's something goofy with UEFI but I haven't been able to pin down a solution. Anyone have any ideas?
Do you have anything in your computer BIOS / EFI Settings regarding Internal Pointing Device?
Two things, one is 99% of touchpads and ig keyboards feed off of the usb chipset.
Check your bios for legacy USB mode, and enable that. This is also useful for a usb keyboard that is not detected on initial boot.
Do you have secure boot enabled? It is not usually required for linux (it is a windows things) outside of dual booting with windows, but secure boot does sign different hardware and can cause odd behavior with integrated devices especially known for graphics.
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When you installed Zorin, did you use the alongside method or the something else method?
If you used the something else method, did you choose the device, the windows boot manager partition or another partition to install GRUB to?
Re-enabling secure boot may resolve it and still boot Linux fine... it's one thing you will have to test.
@337harvey: I think I did the alongside method but chose to install on a completely different hard drive (as this laptop has two bays for drives), so it was a different partition.
I don't recall if I have/had secure boot enabled.
Thanks for the responses! I'll give your suggestions a check to see what I can see.
You will most likely have to change the boot order in the bios, placing the ubuntu listing first. There is not a guarantee that grub will see the windows installation, but that should resolve the touchpad issue.
It sounds like the windows boot manager partition was overwritten, but it may not have been, and it's booting from the second drive. By Zorin being the default OS, grub is accessed first and the linux driver for the touchpad will be loaded (as long as this doesn't create the same issue in Win), it should be fine.