i apologize, was really upset when typing.
It's an Asus Zenbook UX32VD that came with Windows 7 home premium. i used a cloning program to transfer it off the 500GB hybrid to a 256GB SSD. worked just fine and had no issues at all once it did work.
I installed Windows 8 the day of release by downloading the upgrade adviser, buying windows 8 pro and then upgrading. Is far as i can remember it never asked or mentioned anything about a recovery during installation.
I do still have a recovery partition but i'm pretty sure it's still the asus windows 7 partition.
I've got a USB drive to boot up but in trying to do refresh or instal it gives me those errors i mentinoed above.
as far as i can tell none of the downloaded files are still there. At this point i'd like to just wipe and do a fresh instal but i'm not even sure how to really go about doing that on this machine. never done it on a laptop.
so the internet thing.
basically the computer says and shows that it's connected to the internet, i can ping websites fine, but nothing, no web browser, no game, no application, nothing in metro can actually access the internet.
i've tried changing router settings, uninstalling the antivirus (6 times), safe mode, and a dozen other things and absolutely nothing worked.
so at this point i just don't care, i just want to wipe the whole thing and start from scratch, i'd like to do the refresh first if it would let me because it would be nice if that could fix it so i'd at least keep my metro stuff. but if not then i'm fine with just wiping it and starting from scratch i didn't have much installed and i've already backed up my data. i just need this computer working.