I am pulling my hair out here trying to fix an imac that refuses to send video to an external dvi display. It's a fairly new black/silver imac with the mini dvi port, and am trying to hook it to either a 23 or 30" apple display (silver) via an apple dvi to mini dvi adapter.
After swapping out logic board, video card, and BOTH, I pulled another imac off the shelf and tried it, with a different adapter, on a different display, and STILL got no video.
I know with projectors etc you sometimes have to hook things up in a certain order because the mac will see the adapter when you plug it in and will look for the display, and if you hook the adapter to the computer before the adapter to the projector, the mac doesn't see any display and gives up, and you get nothing when you plug in the projector.
I am wondering if this is a double gotcha, because the display is also acting like it's detecting when the adapter is plugged in. Is this a case of the computer has to be plugged into the adapter before the adapter is plugged into the display, AND the display has to be plugged into the adapter before the computer is plugged into the adapter? (catch-22)
We've made several attempts to plug the adapter in at both ends at the same time but it doesn't seem to matter.
I've never seen a silver apple display hooked to an imac via a mini dvi adapter before so I can't say for certain that I know it works, but I can see where there may be an incompatibility. Everyone else I've seen using an external display on an imac using the mini dvi port has been using a non apple display or a VGA display. (vga works fine!)
