Idle curiosity, what exactly might have caused this failure? (physical layer)

Dropped a brand new laptop (HP) off to an end user in a pod group, plugged into the switch, immediately discovered that the laptop only had network on WiFi, the cabled connection was dead.

Root cause: the cable running from the 5 port gigabit switch to the wall was incompatible with this laptop.

Two different switches were tried, different cables from the switch to the laptop were tried, other machines plugged into either switch worked, plugged the wall/switch cable into other machines and it worked fine, just that one specific cable if used from wall --> laptop, wall --> switch or switch --> laptop killed the ethernet connection.

I'm just curious what theoretically might have been going on to cause the failure? What made that specific cable incompatible with that specific laptop but no others?