keeps booting into recovery mode

IMPORTANT: Win8 IS END OF LIFE. Install Linux unless you need it for a legacy application, something like Debian or Linux Mint will do fine on this.

A lot of the time with Win8, it was a mix - 8.x was the first secure boot OS so it had more issues like that where it would boot into recovery. That said, check the HD health as the symptoms match: *READ INTRO NOTE* Diagnosing and Erasing Hard Drives - compatibility not guaranteed beyond Ubuntu 22.04LTS

If the drive is healthy, I would make a bootable USB with these images: https://archive.org/details/win-8.1-engl... -- Microsoft pulled the 8.1 images many years ago as they do when OSes go EOL, so we need to rely on the secondary market for images :-(. I would try the automatic repair option first, but it's iffy as to if it works. If it doesn't, open the command line, type C:/ and then run these commands:

• bootrec /fixboot -- this might give you an access error, if it does, use the other 3.
• bootrec /fixmbr
• bootrec /rebuildbcd
• bootrec /scanos (if it persists)

The fixmbr is a legacy command, but Win8.x was MBR and GPT so I usually ran both, especially on UEFI PCs in case you had a transitional BIOS like I suspect my $25 XPS 8500 was given how poorly it handled the OA3 key storage.

If that doesn't work, you'll need to pull your hard drive and plug it into a working PC to recover the key with a tool like this as I have seen some early Win8 PCs lose their key with BIOS updates: https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details... -- you can also try this command in WinRE:

wmic path softwareLicensingService get OA3xOriginalProductKey

This is what you'd use in Powershell but WinRE only exposes the legacy CLI:

powershell "(Get-WmiObject -query 'select * from SoftwareLicensingService').OA3xOriginalProductKey"

If neither of those work, it needs a reinstall.