I'm guessing you may have used a wrong port on the switch. Take for example, most switches come with uplink port which can use straight-through cable to connect to other switches. This uplink port usually occupy port 1 on most switches so you can't use both at the same time. Testing other ports on the switch is a good idea.
Sometime at the enterprise level, some switches have port filtering that stop newly added devices from disconnecting the old device and adding to the network, but since these are basic switches I wouldn't worry about this feature since it's rare to see them unless you own expensive business switches.