Comment 18 for bug 554471

Hi folks, especially Jeff Lane

I managed to connect a bluetooth mouse up using the unity applet (gnome-bluetooth), and then somehow managed to mess it up in a way similar to the way you folks have - it didn't appear in the bluetooth devices list, yet when I turned it on the lock appeared on the bluetooth icon and it appeared in the applet list... but no "connection" button and didn't appear in the devices list.

This was a relatively new install of Ubuntu 14.04-2 LTS 64bit but I didn't want to just reinstall, so I tried a few different solutions listed (including a few command line commands and blueman) to try to delete the device, all giving the same error as the original poster.

So I gave up and did a locate blue | less and had a look to see where bluetooth state information was and to see if I couldn't erase it and start afresh.

I came across the directory /var/lib/bluetooth/ that appears to hold entries for such devices, including the half-installed-half-broken device - I turned bluetooth off, deleted everything in this directory, rebooted and then could finally get the mouse to repair again! :D

This can't be considered tooooooo radical, because you can delete these entries in that directory as a normal user.

You can probably just get away with deleting the directory associated with the MAC of the device that is causing the problems, if you don't want to lose all your pairings.

Hope that this method of circumvention helps some others here too?

It's certainly a bug and a nasty one that can appear quickly after a verbatim fresh install of 14.04-2 LTS too.