Could I have broken the CPU installing a heatsink?

[gramcracker]

I may have broken the cardinal sin: Thou shalt not damage a computer.

Went over to my friend's place to install a new heatsink. I grounded myself several times, removed the old heat sink, and tried to put the new one on. The bar/latch that locks the new heatsink into place was really hard to snap on, so hard I couldn't get it to go on. I took it off, replaced it with the old heat sink again, plugged it back in, and... nothing. The power went on, the LED on the motherboard lit up, the CDROM and hard drives whirred, but no signal came to the monitor.

Could I have messed up the CPU? I took a closer look at it, and there was some thermal paste on areas besides the very central square, and what looks like a small scratch on the top (Athlon 1700). Could that have destroyed the CPU?

I assumed the video card would still post even if the CPU wasn't working, but maybe that's not right.

I'm gonna take the thing apart and start from scratch, but any info or suggestions you could provide would be greatly appreciated.

 

[nealh]

An Athlon cpu ..yes..the core can be fragile and chipped, cracked etc and damage the processor when installing a HSF...P4 very doubtful...try clearing the cmos...when i placed a new HSF on my athlon... I got initial power up of fan on the cpu and nothing else ..cleared cmos and everything was ok

After re-reading the post I bet you had a similar problem to me...try clearing the CMOS and rebooting

 

[gramcracker]

Will do. thanks for the advice.

 

[WarCon]

Did your screwdriver slip and smack the motherboard? If it did look really closely and see if it cut through the enamel on top and maybe through a (lan)wire on the mobo. Also check and make sure you plugged the fan on the heatsink into the right header.

If it doesn't work after reseting it and you didn't slip and hurt the mobo, take the chip out and put it back in (all of this with the power cord unplugged) and remount your heatsink (assuming you didn't crack or chip your core badly) and power it up again.

If that doesn't work. RIP processor.

 

[nealh]

I agree with Warcon..the one postive thing is he did get mobo power and HDD and cdrom powered up....so try clearing cmos and/or reseating the cpu etc

 

[gramcracker]

Screwdriver definitely did NOT slip.

The small scratch that's on there I think is most likely from trying to get the heatsink to latch on, and having it slip around/having to re-seat it in its place. I know I didn't cut through anything on the bottom side, the scratch is very shallow, like it just took the top layer of "enamel/paint" off.

The other thing: before we got it running properly, it had been doing a very similar thing. Gonna go work on it tonight. Thanks for the advice!