HP Envy Laptop, can't recover, can't format, can't f*cking deal with this.

Friend brings in his laptop, HP Envy DV4. It's a Windows 8 laptop, and the wired connection can ping out, and can access the internet normally. Wireless can ping out, but cannot browse at all. No viruses removed from the machine before I got it, and my scans find nothing. Dig around, I find DNS is working, IP config is fine, so I install Chrome via a stand alone installation. Still no browsing. After not really finding a cause, I tell him it'd be faster just to take data off, and do a factory restore. So he brings all his disks in.

I try a system restore btw, to a time before the problem started, no dice, so onward I go....

System restore disks away, it wipes HDD, and starts putting the craptop back where it was, straight from the factory. Then it fricking fails. No fancy error messages, just a "Hey, I shite myself, and I can't do shite. But hey, I DID format myself, so enjoy." My only options at this point are save a log file, see error message, which is useless upon Googling, and try again. Okay, try again, this time without the added drivers disk. Same thing. But hey, like I give a frick, right? A clean install is no big deal, I do this every two weeks anyway. Then I get the message after popping in a Windows 8 disk... Windows Boot Manager cannot find \EFI\Microsoft\Boot\BCD

Okay, well damn. Okay, now this is my only option btw, there's no Windows setup, it's this or bios, so into the bios I go. DVDrom is first boot device, set for UEFI. Secure boot off, and.... same shite. So I flip the options, legacy boot, and break out my Windows 7 disk. Well, now I got something, it lets my format the shite the failed HP Recovery Disks F'ed up. And what the hell, I put Windows 7 on the laptop, just in case. Call them up, they still want Windows 8. Okay, pop in my Windows 8 disk, flip it to UEFI, and..... same shite, Windows Boot Manager cannot find this file (see above).

Anyone dealt with this shite before? Not sure what the problem could be at this point, but I make it a habit of not putting Windows 8 on anything, so maybe I'm just missing something.