My husband and I have a 7 year old Samsung french door refrigerator with a drawer freezer. The fridge has worked awesome since day one, despite hearing how many people have had issues with their's. On Sunday morning, I was awakened by the fridge making a steady thumping noise that seemed to be coming from the top of the fridge cabinet and small spurts of water coming from the water dispenser. The control panel on the front was completely blank and when I opened the fridge and freezer compartments, there were no lights whatsoever and I could tell that everything was warmer than it should be. My husband had just gotten his lunch out for work just a few hours earlier and it was working absolutely fine. I'm leaning towards a bad control board which I don't mind replacing since the fridge has worked so well for us over the years but I want to make sure that's the problem before I tear it completely apart. Samsung has been less than helpful and I don't really want to spend the money on a tech to come out and tell me something I might be able to take care of myself. Thanks for the help!

I finally got the chance to pull off the back panel and despite everything looking fine on the board I'm still leaning towards that being my problem. I plugged it back in to see if it would do anything and it remains silent and the only thing it does is the lights above the dispenser are flashing. Zero power evidenced anywhere else and no noise, no fan, no display panel, nothing. I did find a fuse and look at it and it seems completely normal. My only worry is if I buy a board and that doesn't fix it. My local parts store won't let me return it if it doesn't fix the problem.

Sorry about the split, it was illegible if not enlarged.
Try pulling the AC plugs labeled CN72 to 74 on left bottom one at a time (while unplugged) and see what happens. The board has what they called an inrush protection circuit that is designed to avoid damage to the board when it is first pluggeg in. It may be that a shorted component triggers that circuit.

That is probably your issue then. You can try disconnecting that board from the main board and seeing if other functions return. If so that's it. If I was looking at it I would connect everything properly and it might be worth also disconnecting the plug that goes down to the compressor from the inverter board to verify that the compressor isn't the actual problem.

I unplugged everything from the board and not a single thing started working, just the lights above the dispenser flashing again. After unplugging it from the outlet and connecting everything again I plugged it into the outlet again and sat there for a while to see if the compressor at least got hot. It didn't but after a few minutes it did starting making the noise again. Whatever it is it is strong enough to shake the entire fridge and it seems to come from the top of the fridge rather than the bottom. It's getting extremely frustrating.