I'm never really into answering my own posts but after calling AppleCare (even though I had no longer valid AppleCare I still tried it) it turns out to be a hardware issue.
My macbook is going away for repair on next monday and it will take up to 5 working-days before I get my Macbook back with functioning trackpad!
The steps we've taken during the phone call:
- Shut down the Macbook, connect the charger and perform a SMC-reset. (The led indicator on the magsafe will turn from orange to green and back to orange if successful)
- Boot with Command + R - this step was taken to check if the touchpad works in Recovery Mode, ruling out Mavericks being the issue.
As per the asker's comment:
This happens while laptop didn't have a battery installed , after installing the battery everything worked as normal .
I had the same "trackpad not found" error on a MacBook Pro 13 inch mid-2010 running macOS 10.13 "High Sierra" and now 10.14 "Mojave" beta 2. I removed the 8-year-old battery because it swelled to the point the trackpad couldn't physically click. I reconnected the battery and the Trackpad preferences work again.
I'm inclined to see if the hackintosh community has found any methods which force the Trackpad preference pane to appear (e.g. fooling macOS into thinking there's a battery installed). If allowed by Ask Different, I'll update my answer with such workarounds.
Digression:
I consider this behavior a bug, because it wrongly assumes "all MacBooks have batteries installed". The presence of a battery doesn't indicate presence of a trackpad; the presence of a trackpad indicates presence of a trackpad.
But, Apple could argue that the user was warned by the sticker on the battery itself to not remove it; so what happens after removing or replacing it is somehow the user's responsibility.
The last MacBooks with removable batteries (2008 Unibody MacBook and MacBook Pro) were last supported by OS X 10.11 "El Capitan"; I do not know if it contains this bug; even if it did, it would not get fixed (10.11 now receives security updates only).
The only "legitimate" scenario I've thought of that would cause this issue is if the battery electronics, the logic board's battery circuitry, or the connections between the two are faulty, causing macOS to think there's no battery installed. As this scenario is unlikely (hopefully), I think the behavior of macOS is unlikely to be fixed.
Best Answer
open up system prefs and click the 'view' drop-down options (Next to the apple logo on the upper left corner of your monitor its the third option) > go to 'customize' and check to see if there are any disabled preferences...(such as your touchpad or whatever...)