Heatsink Popped Off!

I've seen this happen before but I'm not too sure as to a potential repair route.

I'm working on a HP Pavilion 775y desktop computer. The heatsink that cools the northbridge popped off so it's doing all sorts of funky stuff. The mounting posts for the heatsink appear to be soldered to the motherboard (it's a black plastic shim with a metal ring extending out of the top that anchors the heatsink mounting arms down). Now one of the mounting posts is completely missing. I searched high and low through the chassis with a flashlight and a set of fine needle nose pliers and I've pretty much disassembled the entire case so it's nowhere to be found. The thing that baffles me is what kind of fix is there for this? Can I just get a new mounting post and install that or is this considered to be a trashed mobo?

Unless the chip has burnt out, it should be repairable.

the mobo is probably OK... it's the CPU chip itself you have to worry about... if you can remove it from it's housing... examine it carefully... if looking at the top, you find a light blackend or brownish smudge (it's rea faint, like some one lightly touched their finger to it while covered in ink) ... the cpu maybe fried and you'll need a new one. At which point, might as well take it in, have someone put a proper sink and mounting posts in (I fried a CPU once because I didn't properly seal the heat sink to the chip.)

-tg

Quote:

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if looking at the top, you find a light blackend or brownish smudge

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I keep thinking that the chip may very well be toast. Before I removed the board or attempted any type of thought process on this, I noticed the chip had a decent bit of dust on it as did the bottom of the heatsink so I'd say it's a fair wager that the heatsink had been off of the chip for some time. Also, after cleaning the dust off of the chip, I noticed there's quite a bit of stuff that didn't come off (might be from the thermal compound residue) and the surrounding area around the chip doesn't look too hot (looks somewhat charred but I can't quite make it out clearly).

You can do a quick test to see if it's worth to spend more time fixing the heatsink clips by pressing/holding the heatsink to the chip with your hand and try to run the PC for a while (don't forget to apply some thermal paste between the heatsink and the surface of the chip), like 5 minutes or so... If the PC runs OK, you can fix the mounting clips by cutting a piece of a paper clip and bend it so that the 2 ends can go thru the holes on the MOBO. You then can solder then new clip to the MOBO. You may have to remove the MOBO to have room to work on.