I recently updated the "Standard AHCI Driver" (whatever it was called), to the one suggested on the laptop manufacturer's website.
At first, it kept going through the automatic recovery process. With much trouble, I managed to get the Windows 8 installation to boot into safe mode and stop it from automatically trying to fix startup (which was not working).
Now, when the computer restarts, it complains about iaStor.sys being invalid and / or missing. This makes sense, since the offending driver is causing all of these issues.
My question now- is there a way I can revert to the Standard AHCI Driver? Possibly using a recovery console? I want to avoid re-installing Windows, which is the only way I can see to fix this problem now.