I recently bought a refurbished second hand Lenovo ThinkPad T530. It mostly works very well, but the internal webcam seems to have a problem, which sometimes causes the laptop not to boot on Linux (I'm dual booting, on Windows it always booted so far, once the webcam worked, but usually not on Windows either).
If indeed the webcam is broken, I can live without it, but I would like it to boot consistently. Is there a way to just bypass it during startup?
Below is some system information that seems to indicate a problem. Does it indeed indicate that it is broken?
$ uname -a
Linux ThinkPad-T530 4.10.0-33-generic #37~16.04.1-Ubuntu SMP Fri Aug 11 14:07:24 UTC 2017 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
lsusb doesn't show it (at this boot)
$ lsusb
Bus 002 Device 003: ID 046d:c06a Logitech, Inc. USB Optical Mouse
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 8087:0024 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 17ef:1003 Lenovo Integrated Smart Card Reader
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 8087:0024 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
My syslog seems to indicate some kind of error:
$ cat /var/log/syslog
Sep 10 03:14:24 ThinkPad-T530 kernel: [ 4638.962216] usb 1-1.6: USB disconnect, device number 4
Sep 10 03:14:24 ThinkPad-T530 kernel: [ 4639.093266] usb 1-1.6: new full-speed USB device number 5 using ehci-pci
Sep 10 03:14:24 ThinkPad-T530 kernel: [ 4639.173295] usb 1-1.6: device descriptor read/64, error -32
Sep 10 03:14:24 ThinkPad-T530 kernel: [ 4639.361305] usb 1-1.6: device descriptor read/64, error -32
Sep 10 03:14:24 ThinkPad-T530 kernel: [ 4639.549279] usb 1-1.6: new full-speed USB device number 6 using ehci-pci
Sep 10 03:14:24 ThinkPad-T530 kernel: [ 4639.629319] usb 1-1.6: device descriptor read/64, error -32
Sep 10 03:14:24 ThinkPad-T530 kernel: [ 4639.817317] usb 1-1.6: device descriptor read/64, error -32
Sep 10 03:14:25 ThinkPad-T530 kernel: [ 4640.005319] usb 1-1.6: new full-speed USB device number 7 using ehci-pci
Sep 10 03:14:25 ThinkPad-T530 kernel: [ 4640.421344] usb 1-1.6: device not accepting address 7, error -32
Sep 10 03:14:25 ThinkPad-T530 kernel: [ 4640.501367] usb 1-1.6: new full-speed USB device number 8 using ehci-pci
Sep 10 03:14:25 ThinkPad-T530 kernel: [ 4640.917436] usb 1-1.6: device not accepting address 8, error -32
Sep 10 03:14:25 ThinkPad-T530 kernel: [ 4640.917625] usb 1-1-port6: unable to enumerate USB device
...
Sep 10 04:40:03 ThinkPad-T530 kernel: [ 9777.896156] usb 1-1.6: new full-speed USB device number 73 using ehci-pci
Sep 10 04:40:03 ThinkPad-T530 kernel: [ 9778.312127] usb 1-1.6: device not accepting address 73, error -32
Sep 10 04:40:03 ThinkPad-T530 kernel: [ 9778.312460] usb 1-1-port6: unable to enumerate USB device
...
Sep 10 19:32:56 ThinkPad-T530 kernel: [ 1.851518] usb 1-1.6: new full-speed USB device number 4 using ehci-pci
...
Sep 10 19:32:56 ThinkPad-T530 kernel: [ 1.931512] usb 1-1.6: device descriptor read/64, error -32
My syslog.1 (which for some reason shows timestamps in between timestamps occurring in syslog) records the log from a different boot, in which the device didn't directly give an error, but didn't work either:
$ cat /var/log/syslog.1
Sep 10 03:57:10 ThinkPad-T530 kernel: [ 4.556905] uvcvideo: Found UVC 1.00 device Integrated Camera (04f2:b2ea)
Sep 10 03:57:10 ThinkPad-T530 kernel: [ 4.559387] uvcvideo 1-1.6:1.0: Entity type for entity Extension 4 was not initialized!
Sep 10 03:57:10 ThinkPad-T530 kernel: [ 4.559388] uvcvideo 1-1.6:1.0: Entity type for entity Extension 3 was not initialized!
Sep 10 03:57:10 ThinkPad-T530 kernel: [ 4.559389] uvcvideo 1-1.6:1.0: Entity type for entity Processing 2 was not initialized!
Sep 10 03:57:10 ThinkPad-T530 kernel: [ 4.559390] uvcvideo 1-1.6:1.0: Entity type for entity Camera 1 was not initialized!
Sep 10 03:57:10 ThinkPad-T530 kernel: [ 4.559458] input: Integrated Camera as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1a.0/usb1/1-1/1-1.6/1-1.6:1.0/input/input16
Sep 10 03:57:10 ThinkPad-T530 kernel: [ 4.559526] usbcore: registered new interface driver uvcvideo
Sep 10 03:57:10 ThinkPad-T530 kernel: [ 4.559527] USB Video Class driver (1.1.1)
Please let me know if I should include more system information and how I can obtain it.
Does this indeed indicate that there is a physical problem with my webcam? If so, as it sometimes seems to prevent me to boot normally, is there a way to just bypass it during startup?
EDIT In the meanwhile I found out that the webcam can actually be disabled in the BIOS for this particular computer. I would still be interested to know if and how it could be bypassed on the OS level.
