Asus x401a Boot loop

Amberharding

Commendable
Dec 31, 2016
5
0
1,510
Hi I have an Asus x401a laptop I am trying to fix for my neighbors daughter-they don't have a lot of money so I am just trying to help out. It is preloaded with Windows 8.
It continuously does the boot loop, even when I tried the F9...recovery starts-then goes to "Preparing automatic repair" but then it blue screens to " your pc ran into a problem and need to restart"

I bought a new hard drive for it-I tried to find Windows 8 download so I could make a bootable USB..I can only find 8.1.

I am very fluent with Windows XP, Windows 7, but 8 I have very limited experience.

Can someone help me please..
 

Amberharding

Commendable
Dec 31, 2016
5
0
1,510
The link goes to 8.1-will this work? Also how can I extract the keycode from the bad hard drive? I do have a Linux system-the hard drive shows as being stuck in hibernation-I know how to get past that to read the drive, can I find it that way?