Touchpad not working after installation of new SSD

[erimus]

I previously asked for help in replacing the failing hard drive in my HP Laptop 14-cf1020od, and after buying a new M.2 SSD, this evening I opened up my computer, swapped in the new SSD (after misguidedly removing the battery in an attempt to access a nonexistent Hard Drive), inserted the flash drive I made with Windows 10 installation, turned it on, and hit escape and/or F2 to boot from the drive.

Windows 10 installed successfully, but the problem is, the laptop's touch pad is totally inoperable. 

I installed everything that was offered to me in Windows Update (and restarted when prompted), but no luck.

I also tried going to HP Support, putting in my serial number, and downloading/installing the 2 or 3 drivers it suggested (bluetooth something, wireless button something...), but still no improvement.

Windows Settings --> Mouse (and other mouse options) doesn't give me anything helpful, and Control Panel --> Hardware and Sound --> Mouse doesn't help either.

In Device Manager, there's nothing about mice or pointing, but under Human Interface Devices, there are 3 things: HID-compliant wireless radio controls, HP Wireless Button Driver, and I2C HID Device--the last of which has a little exclamation point in a yellow triangle over it.  Is "I2C HID Device" my touchpad, or is the touchpad not even showing up at all?  Under properties, I2C HID Device has Device Status "This device cannot start (Code 10). A Request for the HID descriptor failed."

Should I try going back to HP Support for my computer, try looking at "All Drivers," and try downloading installing some of the things under "Driver-Keyboard Mouse and Input Devices"? If so, how do I decide which to try (or which to try first)? There are 10 different ones, and none of them are for Windows 10 ver. 21h1.

After googling some things,  I also see someone at the end of this thread on Microsoft support mentioning "on youtube I saw a video in which the guy opened his laptop himself and cleaned the touchpad connectors," and looking at my manual again, it looks like the touchpad area is where I was initially looking for the drive after removing the battery. There were some crumbs(?) or some kind of debris along the edges inside my computer, and a fair amount of dust in the fan, so it makes me paranoid that I could I have interfered with the touchpad while it was open. [11/7/21: Edited to strikethrough this because it turned out to be irrelevant.]

Or does the "I2C HID Device" with the yellow< ! > suggest that the hardware connection is fine, it's just a driver/software/update issue?

11/4/21 Update:

This morning, I tried opening up my computer again. I took out the battery to access the touchpad area and looked for anything strange.  I gently flipped open the little cable connector clips (but didn't detach the cables) and flipped them down again.

I also took out the new SDD and put the old SDD back in.

When I turned on my laptop with the old SDD in, now the touchpad DOES work.  However, with the old SDD in, I'm not able to run Device Manager to look at what it says about my touchpad or what driver it's using.  (With the old SDD in, most of my programs aren't working--if I search for Settings and click on it, a blue window with a gear on it opens for a moment... and then disappears. And, for instance, if I use Windows search and choose search the web, it says msedge.exe-Bad Image. C:/Program Files[x86]\Microsoft\Edge\Application\asldfkja;lsdkfj\msedge.dll is either not designed to run on Windows or it contains an error.)

My plan now is to put the new SDD back in and concentrate on finding a driver fix.  This post on Reddit, "Windows 10 does not detect touchpad (not shown in device manager)"   seems promising, although it's two years old. What caught my eye is the poster mentioning that the driver for “Intel Serial IO” fixed it, because when I view the properties of my yellow!triangled I2C HID Device, the location is given as "on Intel(R) Serial IO I2E Host Controller - 9DE9".

[erimus · Accepted solution]

IT'S FIXED!  It took forever because I went down some wrong turns (like focusing on touchpad drivers), and because I had to Google almost every step of what I wanted to do (and even then, the results weren't a total match for my situation, so I had to extrapolate and use trial and error), but yeah, like the person on Reddit, the key point was deleting the driver that my "Intel Serial IO I2C Host Controller - 9DE9" was using and, in Device Manager, doing "Update Driver" for it, choosing "let me pick from a list of available drivers on my computer" (instead of trying use "Search for drivers in this location" and pointing it at the folder of driver stuff I'd recently downloaded from HP, which kept telling me "the best driver is already installed) . Once I chose "let me pick from a list of available drivers on my computer," it showed me two--version 30.100.1727.1 [7/3/2017] and version 30.100.1929.1 [7/15/2019]. I chose the newer one, and in an instant, the HID section of my Device Manager went from 3 devices to 10 devices, including I2C HID Device (no longer with a yellow ! triangle) and "ELAN Precision Touchpad Filter Driver."

I'm not entirely sure where the driver version 30.100.1929.1 came from, because before I understood how to manually install a different driver, I tried downloading and double-clicking on various drivers from various parts of HP and other companies' sites.

If possible, I'd like to update this post to include more details in case it'll help someone else with the same problem, but for now, I'm exhausted.

11/7/2021: Editing to add more details to this post. A lot of these are probably useless/unnecessary steps, but since I don't really know, I figure I might as well just log what I did. (This is based on memory and some partial notes/screenshots I was jotting in a Google doc as I was doing it.)

Okay, so when my touchpad was inoperable, the relevant part of my Device Manager looked like this--there's that I2C HID Device with the yellow !triangle.

Googling, I saw a fair number people in my same situation, but usually, there was no solution posted.  That's probably because, like me, they were focused on fixing the I2C HID Device driver. However, the actual clue to solving the mystery is the LOCATION that Device Manager shows for that I2C HID Device--in my case, the Intel Serial IO I2C Host Controller - 9DE9, highlighted in the screenshot above.

In the Device Manager, Intel(R) Serial IO I2C Host Controller - 9DE9 (and its sibling -9DE8) is listed under System Devices. Oddly enough, these Serial IO I2C Host Controllers did NOT have yellow !triangle alerts, even though deleting and reinstalling their driver fixed my problem.

Since this was the first time I was trying to manually fiddle with drivers, I had to do some searching to figure out how to delete this device's driver. (I saw some how-tos that showed a checkbox for "delete driver" when you're uninstalling a device, but my computer never gave me that checkbox.)

1. In Device Manager, open the properties of Intel(R) Serial IO I2C Host Controller - 9DE9, go to the "Driver" tab, click on the "Driver Details" button, and write down the location and name of the Driver file. (In my case, it was C:\WINDOWS\system32\DRIVERS\iaLPSS2i_I2C_CNL.sys).
2. Apparently, you can't delete the driver if a device is still actively using it, so next, click the "Uninstall Device" button for Intel(R) Serial IO I2C Host Controller - 9DE9.
3. Turns out the other I2C Host Controller (-9DE8) also uses that driver, so I had to open its properties and click "Uninstall Device" for Intel(R) Serial IO I2C Host Controller - 9DE8, too.
4. THEN, I could finally go to C:\WINDOWS\system32\DRIVERS\, find iaLPSS2i_I2C_CNL.sys, and delete it.

This is probably(?) an unrelated step, but at this point, I wondered, "hey, will HP notice that my computer is missing a driver now?" So I went to the HP Customer Support - Software and Driver Downloads page for my computer, did "Detect my Drivers," and it offered me the "Intel Rapid Storage Technology Driver," so, what the hell, I installed it, which prompted a reboot.

After the reboot, I took a look at Device Manager, and, wow, under HID, the I2C HID Device was totally gone, and under System devices, the two Intel(R) Serial IO I2C Host Controllers had yellow alert !triangles and NO drivers. (Because, yeah, I deleted the driver.)

In my previous days of struggling with this, I'd been downloading (and trying to run/install) various things, including

• Intel Driver & Support Assistant,
• HP Support Assistant,
• HP Hardware Diagnostics,
• the contents of my old SDD's drivers folder,
• anything that came up after clicking on "Detect my Drivers" on the HP Customer Support - Software and Driver Downloads" page at various times,
• possibly one or more of the things listed under Driver-Chipset under "All Drivers" on the HP Customer Support - Software and Driver Downloads" page for my computer,
• sp92020.exe, obtained by doing a Google search for site:ftp.hp.com intel serial io 9DE9, ending up at http://ftp.ext.hp.com//pub/softpaq/sp92001-92500/sp92020.html, figuring out that I needed to open Internet Explorer and change the beginning from http:// to ftp://, and change the end from sp92020.html to sp92020.exe

...so I figured I ought to have _some_ kind of working driver somewhere on my computer and it was just a matter of re-installing the right one.

So... Device Manager-->Intel(R) Serial IO I2C Host Controller - 9DE9 properties-->Driver tab--> Update Driver button.

My first impulse was to try the one I FTP'ed, so first, I chose "Browse my computer for drivers--Locate and install a driver manually." I'd tried clicking into the swsetup\SP92020 folder, opened the "base" folder and seen it contained a .sys file with the same name as the driver I'd deleted, so I figured, okay, search for drivers in this location: C:\swsetup\SP92020, and include subfolders. HOWEVER, that gave me the message "The best drivers for your device are already installed," and I was like, "WHAT!? THERE AREN'T EVEN ANY DRIVERS INSTALLED FOR THIS DEVICE RIGHT NOW!!!"

The next suggested step, checking Windows Update, had been failing me all this time, so instead, I clicked the back button, clicked "Browse my computer for drivers--Locate and install a driver manually" again, and this time, I clicked "Let me pick from a list of available drivers on my computer"...

..and finally, I started getting somewhere--it offered me two drivers:

At this point, in the thick of things, I couldn't tell which of those two was the one I'd FTP'ed (answer: the 7/3/2017 one), or where the other one had come from (still not sure), but I figured, okay, let's try one, and if it doesn't work, uninstall/delete/try the other one, and I chose the newer version, 30.100.1929.1 [7/15/2019] and clicked Next.

...and in an instant, my device manager went from this to this:

And I unplugged my mouse, and my touchpad was working, and I was so happy I could die.