I sympathise with your situation! I pulled out my old Dell Latitude brick for 2 weeks while the motherboard arrived from overseas.
Solution that worked for me was that Dell replaced the motherboard, but not the hard drive. The machine now booted BUT Windows 8 refused to start and would not restore. However with the booting ability restored I was able to image the broken Win8 partitions using Acronis to a external HDD.
I then installed Windows 7 SP1 downloaded and installed the drivers including the A08 BIOS patch (important that you do this) and am running the machine with no problems since then. I mounted the Acronis image from the external HDD and restored my documents and personal files after I got a staple OS.