Windows 8 startup loop

[anonmouse]

Ok, I've got a Samsung np300e5e laptop that has a startup loop issue that I'm attempting to fix for my aunt. At this point, I'm about to either give up and give it back to her or throw the damn thing against the wall. I've never had this much frustration with a computer before. After doing a bit of research, the startup loop with windows 8 is a fairly common issue. I've read that a repair install will fix the issue, but you need to have previously created a windows 8 recovery disk. Being that I cannot get into windows to create the recovery disk, I've tried finding one online. Closest thing I've found was a complete windows 8 X64 ISO. I downloaded and put that on a CD. Popped that into the drive and tried booting to it. Cannot boot to the CD, the computer still boots directly to the hard drive. I tried getting into bios and could not. Users manual says tap f2 to get into bios. F2 does nothing. I've tried every F key as well as escape and could not get into bios. I did finally get into bios by removing the hard drive and booting. I changed the boot order and enabled Legacy bios. Restarted and STILLLLL could not boot from CD OR USB HDD/Flash Drive. The only thing that this did, was change the look of the Samsung splash screen. It says at the bottom, F2 to enter setup, where as it was just the samsung logo before. Pushing F2 still does nada. The only way I was able to get back into bios was to remove the hard drive again. After removing the hard drive and taking another look back at bios, Secure Boot and boot order have been changed back to enabled/UEFI mode and the boot order has been changed back to SATA HDD being at the top. Tried again and I cannot get bios to save the settings. I could reset the bios to default by unplugging the battery, but Samsung designed this laptop to where you have to completely strip apart the chassis in order to get to the bios battery. No telling if that's going to work either. Anyone have any clever ideas? I'm going to try creating boot media from a VM or something, but i'm not sure it's going to do any good if I cant boot to CD. This has been a learning experience if anything. I'm know 100% convinced that both Samsung and MS are boneheads.

 

[anonmouse]

Hoookay, for anyone who cares, I "Think" I finally got a solution figured out for this. So, the issue was that I could not get bios to save settings and boot to any other device with the hard drive plugged into the sata port. Thinking there was an issue with bios, I looked on the Samsung website for an update and found the only one they offer must be initiated through windows itself. Some manufacturers often have bootable bios updates that you can drop on a CD or thumb drive. This time, was not the case. I ended up pulling the hard drive out and connected it to a sata-to-usb, formatted the main partition and used diskpart to delete all of the recovery partitions. Being that there was no OS and no recovery partition on the disk, windows bypassed the hard drive and I'm now looking at the windows installation screen. ~ Woot~