Laptop battery died and now I have no camera

English Hardware
1

Good morning - I have a MSI CX61 laptop with 15.1

Yesterday my wife was using Zoom with the camera working normally and the laptop battery died as the plug in the charger was not fully engaged. On plugging into the mains we have no camera! Everything else seems to be working normally but I can find no trace of the (inbuilt) camera. Can anyone please give me some ideas as to how to investigate whether or not this is a permanent loss and reinstate it if it isn’t.

Thanking you in anticipation,

Schrod

2

I assume the camera is ‘physically’ still there, but is not detected?

What application made you decide “no camera”? Is this only in Zoom? or is it true for other applications that use the camera?

Can you open an xterm or a konsole and provide here the output of entering the following in the xterm or konsole (as a regular user):


lsusb 



lsusb -t 



dmesg | grep -i cam
3

One further point - when researching your laptop, I did note that some MSI laptops have a webcam function key, that switches the webcam off and on. Make certain that IF your laptop has such a key, that it does not have the webcam switched off.

My apologies for posting such an obvious thing to check - but sometimes for myself, its the most obvious thing that I miss.
.

4

Thank you oldcpu. I didn’t even know that my laptop had a webcam function key as the camera hadn’t been used very much until recently. Please don’t apologise for posting the obvious as some of us miss the obvious! Fn F6 turned the camera back on and it works again, though how it got turned off is a mystery.

Thanks again and problem solved. Best wishes

Schrod

5

Probably dead battery did it. Ie set things back to default