Question Bootloop after changing thermal paste

[Samuele96]

Last week my brother and I decided to clean up and change thermal compound on its 3 years old laptop, a Dell G3 17 3779 equipped with an 8th generation i7 and a Nvidia GeForce 1060 Max-Q.

Right after reassemblying it the PC booted up correctly and ran for a few minutes, but as soon as he opened a game it crashed, rebooted, and bootlooped since then (not even BSoD, on reboot).
After a week of testing I think the problem boils down to the GPU and here's why:

• Booting a live version of Ubuntu (20.04) works (Nvidia drivers not present).
• Booting a live version of Pop!_OS (20.04 Nvidia version) doesn't work and the boot log says "Failed to start Detect the available GPUs and deal with any system changes. See system-ctl status gpu-manager.service for details" and the desktop environment (GNOME?) won't start.
• A fresh install of Windows 10 crashes as soon as it downloads the drivers from the internet. The BSoD reports SYSTEM_THREAD_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED in nvlddmkm.sys and bootloops to the same BSoD.
• A fresh offline install of Windows 10 works, and it doesn't loads Nvidia drivers obviously.

I've already tried to loosen CPU and GPU screws that I read somewhere may be too tight and cause similar problems, as well as changing the thermal compound again, with careful cleaning.

Any idea?

 

[Lutfij]

You should fabricate your bootable OS installer using Windows Media Creation Tools. Make sure that the laptop's BIOS is up to date. After the OS is installed, manually install any and/or all drivers in an elevated command, i.e, Right click installer>Run as Administrator.

FYI, you should download all relevant(latest) drivers onto a pen drive using a donor system if your laptop is very unstable. Source the latest GPU drivers from Nvidia's support site. Since it's a Del laptop, you can use the Service tag to narrow down the laptop/specs you have.

I also hope you didn't remove the thermal pads and replace them with thermal paste...?

 

[Samuele96]

You should fabricate your bootable OS installer using Windows Media Creation Tools.

Done

I also hope you didn't remove the thermal pads and replace them with thermal paste...?

No, we only cleaned the old thermal paste and applied the new one.

 

[Samuele96]

I've tried excactly what you've said:

• Updated BIOS, Chipset and Thunderbolt software from Dell website with service tag search
• Installed Nvidia GeForce Game Ready drivers download from official Nvidia website

The system crashed during Nvidia driver installation with PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA. When it rebooted, drivers were NOT installed.