She has a relatively new lenovo ideapad running windows 8. It's an ultra book so no DVD drive. When its switched on, it starts going through an auto repair process which it always fails to complete. Windows will not boot, at all. Restarting basically starts the whole repair process again. There does seem to be a 24gb partition that I can only assume holds a rescue image but I can't seem to get to it.

Any ideas?

Is it leaking water?

If the 24GB partition does contain a rescue image it will need something to boot from to read it. If you can acquire a Windows 8 DVD you can copy the files to a USB stick and make it bootable (Google for installing Windows 7 or 8 from USB, both are the same process), then hopefully use that to boot the laptop and start the system restore.

What Matt said, I've used the Win7 USB tool to rescue a Windows 7 PC before now, and it worked without any problems...

I discovered the built-in recovery utility and tried that. First two times, it couldn't complete the operation due to some random error. The third and subsequent times its started telling me the system partition isn't what it expected so it can't continue unless I fix it. I haven't touched the partitions!

I'm now assuming that the disk is screwed for some reason and I'm out of options other than obtaining a windows 8 disk and doing a completely clean install. But there's no licence key on the computer and I'd have to buy windows 8.

I do have windows 7 ultimate that I got free when windows 7 was released. I've installed that on 2 computers using the same key so I wonder if its a key that let's me do multiple installations. If it is, she could have windows 7...

Sounds like a dead/dying hdd.  Don't trust it.

Bung it back under warranty?

Yeah, that was my thought too!

That's going to be my advice to her. Only potential problem is her mum bought it cheap. Hope she can get a warranty return!

"bought it cheap"

Surely that shouldn't matter as long as it's new and from a proper retailer?

Yeah. Talking about my ex wife here.

"Bought it cheap" sounds worrying.  Alarm bells were already ringing when you said it didn't have a Windows Licence on it anywhere. I'm pretty sure PC manufacturers can't sell full Windows based machines without a licence these days.

Depends what version of Windows.  Windows 8 comes with the key in the BIOS now.  I looked high and low for my key last night and ended up having to get a program to extract it out of the BIOS.