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Laptop Keyboard and Mouse Won't Respond at Login Screen
First of all, I want to thank everyone involved in the creation and maintenance of this forum, including all the people who have given answers. I've used many.
Now, my problem...
I'm running Linux Mint 18.2 Cinnamon on an HP 2760p.
I am NOT a master of the command line, just barely getting started with it really, but completely willing to try and fairly good at following explicit instructions. So, I don't know if it matters, but several days ago I was playing around in the terminal trying to update Wacom drivers as the touchscreen on the machine didn't work in Linux (tried several distros, touchscreen never worked with any of them, but did work if I ran Windows, which I loathe). I have no solid reason to believe my tinkering caused this problem, but I don't know, so I'm mentioning it. In the end, the touchscreen was left not working in Mint, but all else seemed fine.
A few days went by, all seemed good, then today I tried to log in from a suspended laptop and the touchpad, the "pointing stick" (joystick in the middle of the keyboard) and the keyboard all failed to respond.
I tried forcing the power off multiple times, even pulled out the battery, but no change from the system. No response from any input at the login screen.
I will say that I tried the ALT+SysRq+r,e,i,s,u,b at that dead login screen and it did shut down the system. So I was pretty sure my keyboard was fine.
Luckily I have multiple 2760p's, so I took a unit that boots Ubuntu fine and swapped hard drives between them. I got the same dead keyboard/touchpad behavior from the Mint drive. Also, the original unit that now had the Ubuntu drive in it worked fine (the keyboard and touchpad/pointing stick all functioned). So I confirmed this is not broken hardware.
So, back to the Mint drive with the "frozen" login screen. I booted that unit with a Mint liveboot usb and I'm able to see the hard drive and browse it, for the most part. I thought this was related to the liveboot-ing, but hidden folders could not be explored via the GUI or the terminal. I also tried booting to the command line, but both ways I got a message saying I don't have permission necessary to view the contents.
I was able to make a copy of all the stuff that wasn't hidden and copy it to a flash drive. Problem is, some of the stuff in the /home/username folder is hidden and I'm not able to make a copy of any of it. My main concern was the .thunderbird folder, but it's the same as all of them - no permission.
I played around with chmod and... shoot, can't remember the other one but it was supposed to copy files without changing r/w permissions, but neither got me anywhere. I remember a message when I booted to the command line and made an attempt there saying something about a read-only file system. Sorry, I know this is probably completely annoying - I should have written everything down.
I also tried something from a forum saying to use Alt+F2 then typing gksu nautilus, but that doesn't do anything on any of my systems. Also, as far as I know, all the times I booted into the command line and worked in the terminal, I was root.
My goal is ultimately to be able to make a copy of my entire /home/username folder and drop it into another unit with Mint installed. As it is, the most important hidden folder, as far as I'm aware, is that .thunderbird folder as it has my profile in it. If I could get just that profile file I might be okay, but it seems any solution allowing me to copy that file will probably allow me to copy all the other hidden stuff as well.
I'm tempted to just reinstall Mint and lose my data and start over, but as much work as this is, and as bummed as I am over the headache, it seems if I can figure this out it will be quite a learning experience. I SO appreciate any input/ideas here. Thank you.
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for finding my fav SysRq!!!
