Moving cursor with trackpad is not working. How to fix it?

Today morning after starting my computer, I noticed very weird behavior with my trackpad cursor is on the top corner and I can't move it at all however click is working, bottom click is working. Here are some things I have already tried:

  • Reset the settings related to the trackpad.
  • Reset SMC.
  • Reset NVRAM/PRAM.
  • In the end, I reinstalled the OS as well.
  • Ran hardware diagnostic(with long press on D while starting up) and it showed no problems at all.

One issue I found after reinstalling the MacOS was that in the ~/Library/Preferences any plist file related to Trackpad was missing. I was expecting com.apple.AppleMultitouchTrackpad.plist, which is not there.

This computer is 2017 version of Macbook Air.

Any help on this would be very much appreciated. Thank you very much for your time!


After all the things you already did, I would think a hardware defect is most likely. Plist files won't exist until you change some settings.