Laptop has locked me out

[pablo180]

I was having problems with my USB mouse on my Dell 1525 on Intrepid, it was randomly stopping working and the only way to get it to work again was to reboot.

Stupidly I tried to find a quick way of getting it to work again by stopping and starting services. I stopped dbus (yes, I know, I ignored the warning) and started it again. Apart from the screen changing briefly everything seemed OK, but I logged out my touchpad/trackpad stopped working, so I couldn't log back in again!

I've restarted but although it boots up fine, plays sound fine, the touchpad doesn't work, so I cannot log in. The USB mouse doesn't work either so my laptop is now useless!

What the hell have I done? And how can I put it right? I have backups so I can copy files over, but I haven't got a clue what I need to replace. I have been searching Google for answers but nothing, at least nothing that I understand, or that won't make things worse.

Other than this touchpad problem everything else seems to be working fine.

Hope someone can help.

[jerrrys]

have you tried gconf-editor

navigate to here and enable touch pad

Screenshot.png

[RabbitWho]

How does he get there without the touch pad?

On windows you could do everything without the mouse.. but as the super key does next to nothing now I'm just wondering how you get around without a mouse/touchpad?

[jerrrys]

How does he get there without the touch pad?

On windows you could do everything without the mouse.. but as the super key does next to nothing now I'm just wondering how you get around without a mouse/touchpad?

Alt + F2 enter/run gconf-editor

[pablo180]

Alt + F2 enter/run gconf-editor

Thanks for the help. Alt + F2 didn't work, nothing happened. I can't seem to type anything on the login screen, I am not sure if it is because I have to select the users picture.

I thought that the keyboard may be messed up too but I pressed Super and an arrow key (just to see if there was a way of moving the mouse pointer) and it went to a console style login screen. I logged in there, so the keyboard is working, but when I typed in gconf-editor it said 'Unable to open display'.

[jerrrys]

if you can get your keyboard to navigate to terminal enter
sudo modprobe psmouse

also this

Screenshot.png

[pablo180]

if you can get your keyboard to navigate to terminal enter
sudo modprobe psmouse

also this

Screenshot.png

Thanks again. I tried fix-x in recovery mode, it didn't make any difference when I tried to log back in. I also tried sudo modprobe psmouse, but neither the touchpad nor the USB mouse worked when I switched back to the login screen.

I did notice however when flicking through the screens that there was a red asterisk with:

Cannot start hardware abstraction layer - please ensure dbus is running

Is that the problem?

[jerrrys]

sudo update-rc.d -f dbus defaults

[pablo180]

sudo update-rc.d -f dbus defaults

That did it! Thanks! As soon as I went back to the login screen the mouse was working and I could log in as normal. As far as I can tell everything seems to be working fine.

Thanks a lot for all of your help.

[jerrrys]

glad to hear that