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#21
I'd like for you to open disk management and take a look at how your hard drive is set up. A 15GB hidden partition sounds about right for the recovery. And it would be accessed by the Samsung Recovery Solution.
Disk Management Windows 7 - How To Access Disk Management in Windows 7
The BIOS is on the motherboard so shouldn't be affected by what's happening to the hard drive. I would get an external hard drive of suitable size. I would use a different free imaging tool called Macrium Reflect only because I have no knowledge of how the SRS works and if you can make a copy of individual partitions. (Macrium will let me make individual partition copies.) You'll probably see three partitions in disk management. 1. System Reserved, about 100MB. 2. Recovery, about 15GB. 3. The ( C: ) partition containing the operating system, and whatever else you might have saved there like other programs, photos, music, etc. You need to get those partitions off the failing hard drive. But as I said before, there's really no way to know where the bad sectors are located. All three of those partitions could have bad sectors and not be usable. That's why I'm kinda pushing for a set of recovery disks from Samsung.
If you're a gambler you could try to restore your machine to factory specs by using the SRS (here's a help guide for SRS 4 ... it should be very similar for 5.) Depending on how many bad sectors you have, it's possible that the restore will just ignore them and you'll be back in business minus maybe just a few bad sectors. But if you have too many bad sectors (and I have no idea how many is too many) you run the risk of turning your laptop into an expensive door stop.