Test your internal Samsung HDD regardless of the status of the operating system with vendor's diagnostic utility ES Tool.
It is strongly recommended to test the drive if it is truly defective by a few fundamental troubleshooting of ES Tool first, to avoid user's unnecessary effort and inconvenience of replacing a good drive. ES Tool can do a drive diagnostic test, Low level format, set max address, set max UDMA mode, AAM MODE (Automatic Acoustic Management), change LBA mode, enable or disable S.M.A.R.T., give you drive information. This tool has write operations, so it is strongly recommended to backup your data first. Samsung has no responsibility of lost data.
ES Tool is a DOS based utility so it is needed to prepare a bootable 1.44-MB diskette or CD. You can download a CD image or a prepared diskette from our link to vendor's site.
Download "estool_CDROM.zip" and extract it. Then use an image burning software in order to create a CD. Backup your data and reboot your system. Enter into BIOS and select BOOT from CD first.