No signal to monitor after changing thermal paste?

[Verica]

Hello everyone

So I'm in a bit of a pickle. Last night I had the brilliant idea of changing the thermal paste that came with my processor with a higher quality one. So after spending half an hour cleaning the old one from my processor I put the new one, mounted the cooler, plugged everything back on and started my pc. Fans started turning, mobo doing its rbg dance, everything is fine except the fact that my screen is getting no signal from my pc. Just blinking in stand by mode. When I plug the HDMI to my mobo instead of graphics card, the screen goes to perpetual blackness, like its working but there's nothing showing. Typing in password logs me in to Windows because my razer keyboard goes from cycling to the costume color scheme, but still nothing on the screen. So after some tinkering and magic I managed to get bios shown and it does not read my m.2 ssd which is where my windows are, but when I go to boot order the ssd is there, however trying to boot from it results in the 'insert boot able thingy' message. I started reinstalling windows and in the step where you pick where to install them my ssd is once again shown, but trying to install windows on it after formatting results in the installation process just stopping half way through (when it's setting up last steps). I don't know what to do anymore. Is my ssd dead? It's less than a year old and worked perfectly until last night. 

My pc specs are: 

Mother  board: msi z170a gaming carbon pro

Graphics card: Nvidia Gtx 1070

Processor: Intel I5 6600k

Ram: G. Skill Ripjaws V F4 16gb

Ssd: Samsung 960 evo 500gb

Edited April 11, 2018 by Verica
Typos

[Hiitchy]

What thermal paste did you use? It's possible the thermal paste was conductive and might have shorted something out. I'd take off the cooler and inspect the paste and see if it spreaded properly and didn't overspread. If it did just clean it off and let it dry before re-applying it.

[Daniel Z.]

Maybe you installed the GPU not fully? 

[Verica]

I used MX-2 by Arctic, the cpu is coated nicely but not too much that it is leaking on the sides. The person that applied the original thermal paste did go overboard and used the entire pack that came with it so there was thermal paste all over the place when I removed the cooler and it took me forever to clean it. Could it be I didn't clean it all off well enough or that maybe some of it got under the cpu? Wouldnt it give an error if it was a cpu issue? Like I said, bios showed all parts except the ssd and didn't show any problems 

[Karter]

I had the same issue and it happend because my cpu power cable didnt work. Did the thermal paste went into the socket?

[Verica]

I don't think so because I didn't remove the cpu, so unless it managed to leak under it it should be fine I think? I took my pc to my boyfriends dad, he works in IT and knows about pc stuff more than I do