Have I Committed A System Suicide

I was having problems and attempted to do a system restore. I left my laptop for about 2 hours and when I returned it was still doing checking of the registry. I let it go for an additional hour but it did not move. I turned off the laptop, took out the battery, put the battery back in and restarted it. The first screen that came up has the hit the esc key to message. The next screen said something about attempTing a and after that just a black screen. I put in the ISO disk I made when I installed windows 8 and the only thing that comes up is the disk flashing lights nothing after that. What can I do? acquire that menu

If your laptop came with a built in OEM version of Windows then there should be a recovery partition which will get you back to the state it was in when you first got it.
Reboot and keep pressing F11. If the recovery partition is there then you should be able to recover.

Hey Hairy Scot, thanks for your reply and suggestion. However, the strangest thing happened after the umteenth time starting the laptop and turning it off. On the last start up, suddenly the screen flashed and it started up like nothing ever happened. The only message I got was that my system restore had not been successful. I should tell you that I know very little about these things and that's probably why things like this happen. I was recently presented Windows 8 as a gift and I followed the directions precisely so that in addition to installing it, I made an ISO disk (I think that's what it's called). I thought that that was actually what I would use in the event something bizarre happened and I had to do a system recover. But, it did nothing this time around; I think it was just my tenacity at turning this thing on and off. Do you happen to have any suggestions for a neophyte like me? I'm afraid to do a system restore as you can imagine. There are just several things that are messing up how this laptop is running and I'd like to put it back to a time about 20 days ago. Or should I just reinstall Windows 8? I'd love to hear from you.

Gagagaby (Gaby)

Glad it worked out for you.
I don't want to quash your adventurous spirit, but I may be wise to seek some guidance about these insidious machines and the perfidious software that makes them tick.