I've never done this before.

[TSP13]

I'm not familiar with partitioning. I'm having problems re-installing windows 8, this USB os is the only thing I can boot from. If I completely format my hdd should I be able to do a clean install of a full version of windows 8.1 with no problems, or would the problem be deeper than that if I can't reinstall it throught recovery media. I'm fairly certain it's not a hardware problem.

[gernot]

If you can't boot the recovery CD then it is a deeper (hardware) problem.
If the recovery CD don't find a Harddisk or reports io-errors it is a deeper (hardware) problem.
If recovery fails because a partition is "wrong" then erasing this partitions can help.

Gernot