Toshiba Help

Within the last two months, I purchased a Toshiba Satellite C855D-S5340 that came with Windows 8 pre-installed. I got it secondhand, from a pawn shop down the street, but it was in excellent condition and I had no trouble out of it. Within the past week, I'd upgraded to Windows 8.1 free of charge because Windows kept suggesting that I upgrade for a better experience. It was only a few days ago that my computer started to act bizarre and I began looking for solutions to the issue.

First, I tried the complete system restore by holding down 0 upon start-up. The dialogue box that asks if you'd like to go into the restore appears and I click yes but then it continues to restart over and over again. I've seen videos and blocks of text on the autorepair loop and thought that was what the problem was, but none of the "fixes" seemed to work for me.

There is also a blue screen that appears with a frown emoticon and a message that says something similar to "You're computer ran into a problem. We're just collecting date for you and then we'll restart." Before I can copy down the error log message, the screen goes black and the whole process starts over again.

I've tried using a recovery disk I got onto a flash drive but it doesn't seem to be working either. It's gotten to the point I was debating opening the computer or taking it to the shop I got it from to see if they can help me. However, if there's a fix that I can do myself to get it back up and running I'd prefer to do it that way so I don't have to spend money I don't have.

Thanks in advance.