DVI cable

[lxskllr]

Hi all, I just got a Dell 2407fwp to replace my Dell 2001fp. When I switched monitors I left the old cable on my gfx card and hooked it up to the 2407. When I rebooted my sata drives weren't visible. It waited forever at bootup then errored out saying I didn't have a boot device installed. I looked in bios and my 2 ide optical drives showed up, but not my sata hds. After rebooting a couple of times with no success(now getting worried), I hooked my old monitor back up and it worked fine. So I reinstalled the 2407 using the cable that came with it and it worked great(yay 🙂).

All is well now, but my question is... Are all dvi cables not the same? I thought dvi was dvi, but apparently that's not the case. Does anybody know why?

 

[YOyoYOhowsDAjello]

There are different kinds of DVI cables, but I don't know how that could be related to your problem of the monitor working but SATA drives not showing up.

http://www.bluejeanscable.com/store/dvi/dvicabletypes.htm

 

[Bob Anderson]

There are DVI-I cables which will pass either a VGA or DVI signal. Then there are DVI-D cables which will pass only a DVI signal. They have different pin counts, with the DVI-I having an extra set of pins for the VGA signal. Nearly all video cards are DVI-I, and nearly all manufacturers include a VGA to DVI adapter. This means you can use a DVI-I outlet on the card on a VGA only monitor.

-Bob

 

[corkyg]

DVI-I cables look like this:
DVI-I
DVI-D cables are missing the end pins in the separate area.
DVI-D

 

[YOyoYOhowsDAjello]

But can either of you think of any reason he could get the monitor to work fine with the wrong cable and boot up and the SATA drives wouldn't be detected?

Oh, and corkyg, your two links are to the same product right now, a DVI-D cable.
EDIT: you fixed it

 

[ojingoh]

huh that is one weird weird device problem you got there. try uninstalling the graphics card from windows on the stable system, unplug it and move it over to the new machine.

 

[lxskllr]

Originally posted by: ojingoh
huh that is one weird weird device problem you got there. try uninstalling the graphics card from windows on the stable system, unplug it and move it over to the new machine.

Everything works fine if I use the cable that came with the 2407fwp. I didn't compare the cables to see if there were any differences. It doesn't matter much at this point. I was just curious about why there was a difference. Of course the bigger question is why did my sata drives disappear when I used the cable from the 2001fp? bios quirk?

 

[ojingoh]

the biggest difference is the pin-out. notice the differences in the d version vs the i version. -- basically the extra pins on the dvd-i version are so you can use a switching digital signal to an analog pinout -- 15sub d basically, even though nobody actually uses all 15 pins, its more like 11 pins.

the sata problem -- no clue. i would hazard a guess and say that the cable is not the issue, it's the card and the irq memory mapped to the card. it (the card) is kickin your sata controller off the bus by taking the sata drives' conroller memory -- in other words you are getting for whatever reason a memory map error. could be the motherboard, could be the driver for the disk controller, cant tell really. open your device manager and switch it to memory allocation table view, the one where it shows the irq interupts for each device, if there is an overlap in address (will be in hex so pay attention!) there is your issue.

of course this is a w.a.g