The asfixwfr.exe file was e-mailed to me by ASUS tech support. It ended up being pretty useless for me. I never bothered to make a disk set, I opted for using a USB thumb drive for my recovery drive. I've since ditched the idea of ever using the recovery drive and erased it. I downloaded a Windows 8 ISO file from TechNet and use that to do a clean install when necessary. The TechNet install media reads my embedded code and then activates online no problem. IMHO clean installs are the way to go to avoid all the OEM bloat that comes bundled with the factory install.
alphanumeric, I went through very much the same things that you did, and I'm glad I found this thread. I got a new ASUS Q200E yesterday. I used EaseUS Partition Manager, merely to resize my C: to make it into C: and D:. Somehow that screwed everything up while doing the partitioning, and I get this error. It says the file is missing or contains errors.
File: \windows\system32\winload.efi error code: 0xc0000225. I'll research that later and try to see why it happened. But that's for the future!
I had created a recovery USB drive yesterday, just as you had done, but I had not made any other backups. I know, that's not smart, but I figured this repartitioning was not risky, and I'd do backups later (no DVD drive on this ASUS Q200E). Booting from that recovery USB drive is getting me nowhere...it says a necessary partition is missing. Wow, something really got hosed.
I have another version of Windows 8 that I bought in Dec. but never used. I have that ISO file on a USB drive, and I booted it. But it's getting an error about the Product Key not matching. I've read another forum that says I can put a PID.txt file on the USB drive and make them match. But then, won't the system have that older key? Maybe that shouldn't matter, but I'd rather have this new key that came with the laptop.
So...finally I'll get to the point! You mentioned that you got the ISO file for Windows 8 from Technet. Would that be the best way for me to get this done? I looked on Technet's site, but I don't see where the ISO files for Windows 8 are. I do see stuff about 8.1. I doubt that would work for me. So can you point me to the right place where I could get a "good Windows 8 ISO" that will boot and let me keep the Product Key that is currently embedded in the system?
Thanks for your help! Your trials and tribulations taught me a lot.