Interesting touchpad/W7 bug?

Just curious what theories you guys/girls could come up with on this one. Adding it to the hardware forums because I don't think it has to do with drivers as much as it does hardware in general. Feel free to move this thread to an appropriate forum if I've misplaced it.

I have a Toshiba L305-S5907 laptop that has a Synaptics touchpad. A clean install of Windows 7 had it working just fine, but I had Linux partitions and ran dual/tri boot with various Linux distributions. I recently decided to wipe my Linux partitions out to reorganize my disk. When I rebooted I noticed that the POST took an extra 5-10 seconds (no way to turn off splash screen to see what hangs it) and my keyboard was dead when it came to POST (I couldn't get into the BIOS without a USB keyboard plugged in). When booting into Windows my laptop keyboard worked, but my touchpad was dead. I checked in device manager and it had hidden my Synaptics device, and was giving an error about malfunctioning hardware/missing driver components. After trying both the Toshiba driver and the generic Synaptics driver I decided to reinstall Windows 7.

After reinstalling Windows 7, the touchpad was still dead. Fair enough I suppose. I figured the touchpad had suddenly died at an extreme coincidence in time (the reboot after removing the other partitions). I installed Linux again today and I reboot into Windows to find the touchpad working...?

I'm baffled as far as why this happened. The disk was checked for errors after the Linux partitions were removed. http://img28.imageshack.us/img28/3309/errorsr.jpg The synaptics entry was hidden. That was the error I received. The unknown device lower in the list is still there and is some Toshiba password utility thing I don't really want.

Does anyone have any sort of theory on what happened or what fixed it? Also note that Windows took over as the boot loader prior to the touchpad going out. I had killed GRUB a day or two before I removed the partitions. I'd like to know what your theories are. No updates were installed, actually booting back into Windows after installing Linux again I thought of the idea that an update had broke it.

Not sure why that did that. You can download the latest driver for your Synaptics Touchpad at the Synaptic website.

http://www.synaptics.com/support/drivers

I did use those drivers. Problem still existed. I used the Toshiba recommended driver and used the driver from the Synaptics site, neither worked. I'm just curious if anyone knows why the touchpad would die like that. I'm more than willing to delete the Linux partitions I just made to see if it happens again

The only thing I can think of is there may be driver conflicts going on.

Did you go into the Control Panel to see what's going on in the Mouse section?

That's where the Synaptics hardware adjustments reside.

When I say I used the Toshiba and Synaptic driver, I mean the touchpad was gone. It didn't work so I removed the driver and installed the Toshiba. I uninstalled the Toshiba and went to the synaptic driver. When I went into the mouse configuration the synaptic tab was there but nothing was listed.

I guess it could be a coincidence, but if I can repeat it I guess I have no real explanation for it. I am going to delete the Linux partition tomorrow and see if I can recreate it. If so I am completely baffled as to why this would happen.

I don't know how you can work your problem out. All I know is that I'm having a similar one. My laptop is an Acer Aspire 5532, 64 bit, with Windows 7. The touch pad works, but the scroll function doesn't want to participate. I've tried to use ALPS for it but its movements are jerky, slow, erratic, and cumbersome. Could you perhaps help me out? My post is in the Drivers section. Thanks.

One thought I did have is whether it would work better if I got a driver specific to the 64 bit, instead of one that's designed for both x64 and x86. I'm looking into it now.