You can read up on those at wikis.
You may be locked in a hiberfile loop. W8 by default, just so it can boot a bit faster, goes to a hibernation file, so sometimes things don't get saved and sometimes things get caught in a loop. everyone was screaming about such problems when it came out and still do actually.
When you do a shutdown it goes back to hiberfile. You have to do a Reset now to get to a cold boot.
Making things worse is every motherboard manufacturer now has it's own new graphical UEFI BIOS and they differ therefore from one manufacturer to another, unlike the old AMI and Phoenix BIOS chips.
UEFI is really like two different BIOS combined. One is the UEFI and the other is a Legacy mode, which returns to something resembling the older style BIOS. Windows also has a registered Secure Boot System which runs direct from the BIOS. If you want to access the BIOS settings more, you need to turn that off.
My advice is this, since it's probably crapped up anyway, but may help recover it. Download a Linux Mint 17 MATE version which is 64 bit and do a side by side install. If the windows can't be recovered, at least you'll have the Linux Mint MATE to use. It's what I use and love it, more like XP than windows 8. An added advantage is you can use it without even installing it, but if that's done you need to save any files to the hard drive instead, because when used as a LIVE DVD booted system, it's "read only", so no saves allowed except to USB flashdrive or a hard drive.
If you install it, can read all partitions on the drive including the windows partitions, and allow access to them also.
http://www.linuxmint.com/
http://www.distrowatch.com shows popularity of it on right side column.
http://www.linuxmint.com/edition.php?id=174 this is the version you want
or can order for $6 plus postage from here.
https://www.osdisc.com/products/linux/linuxmint/linux-mint-171-mate-install-live-dvd-64bit.html
on their front page due to being so popular.
http://www.osdisc.com
If you want something faster than DVD LIVE run system, I can show you how to setup a LIVE USB that greatly increase speed.
I talk about it some in these posts, same thread if you want to read the other comments in it.
http://forums.cnet.com/7726-6617_102-5677848.html
http://forums.cnet.com/7726-6617_102-5677860.html
Purchased a laptop on Ebay...just to use on a trip soon to show pics and dvd's to family so I didn't want to spend much.
Got the laptop, everything works fine....had W8 installed already, thought I received no disk and would create one from a partition (no such luck) but found the disk a few days later inside the drive itself. Did not receive the Product Key with it.
When I booted it up, another user was already there...no problem....I created my own. Then Windows did its thing and immediately began downloading and installing updates.
One of those updates was 8.1......Although the laptop was already activated with W8, it now wanted to activate 8.1 and asked for the Key for 8, which I didn't have. I wrote to the seller to get it, and was sent to an online website. Immediately saw that it was going to be problems.....pirated and hacked W8.
Since I can't activate the legit 8.1 without purchasing it, I'm sending the laptop back; however, when I logged in as Admin to uninstall 8.1 and my user account, Windows attempted on its own to activate, and locked me completely out of the laptop immediately after the login screen disappeared.
I changed the BIOS to boot the the cd, thinking I could just format the drive and erase everything, even if I didn't install W8 again, but the disk isn't bootable evidently because it bypasses it after a minute or so, goes to the Admin login screen and turns black with the lockdown again.
Is there any way to format the drive from the BIOS or by using a bootable W98/XP cd that I still have here and leave it blank before sending it back to the seller for her to deal with the problem at her end later? I DO have an external adapter that can hook the laptop harddrive to my other computer so I might be able to format the drive that way....I would just have to remove the laptop HDD temporarily.
Options? I'm already PO'd, so please don't make this worse. lol
New laptop already purchased and being shipped.....

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