Still seems similar to my issue. I could not boot off of any USB device but DVDs worked. A bad hard drive would not prevent you from booting to an external source. Try to burn a DVD and see if that works. If so you will need to upgrade your bios.
I just had a similar issue with my Samsung laptop 2 months ago. Can you get into the bios? If not you have a corrupt bios. I'll have to look around my one drive to find the thread that helped me repair it. The Series laptops have a ton of bios issues sadly.
Edit: Just saw you were able to get...
Thank you for leading me in the right direction. I was able to find a useful guide!
System Preparation Tool - Use to Customize Windows - Windows 7 Help Forums
I found ExpressCache useless on my Asus Zenbook. I replaced the hard drive with a SSD and used the small SSD as a recovery partition with my own custom refresh image. If you don't want to buy a SSD get a hybrid drive or a 7200 RPM hard drive. The 5400 RPM HGST hard drives in these laptops are...
I currently have a Windows snapshot made and I linked the wim to the refresh but I would like an image that already has multiple programs installed. I am curious if it is possible to reboot into sysprep Audit mode on my current setup and make an image? I would like an image that would take it to...