Has anyone had this happen - Boots only as a PC

Question

Right now I have a 200 GB windows 7 PC running on an Imac body. The drive should be 1 TB but I gave the bulk to my mac side because I need it for photoshop and my main applications. The system fails to recognize the mac partition completely when booting up.  I get the prohibitory symbol about 3 or 4 min into booting up. It lingers on that screen for about an additional minute, then starts up windows 7. Windows 7 boots up normally and the system runs okay after that.  Windows 7 scan disk can't find any problems. I downloaded HD Tune Pro trial version. It reveals there are a few bad sectors, and further unstable ones. The main issue it has is the heat of the drive. It runs at about 130 (F) consistently. If the Imac is idle it settles a little cooler but not by much.
Any attempts to try to reset anything or insert the apple boot CD has failed. The machine continues to skip over the Mac side and load windows 7. I'm certain this is a hard drive failure of some sort, though the inquisitive part of me wants to know exactly what kind of failure can cause one partition to completely fail and the other to continue running okay (for now).
Some other odd things that happened since the failure:
- I can now almost fully access the mac partition via windows. I can't open system files or programs, but I can load jpgs and copy over stuff from that drive. I've now fully backed up both partitions on an external drive. I mean as much as I can. I don't think anything can be done for saving applications and settings related to them. I have grabbed what looks like the bookmarks for my web browsers and my personal stuff.
- I wasn't previously able to do so. When the Mac partition was functioning, I wasn't able to open the drive at all via windows. It would open up essentially what looked like a blank disk, ask me to format, or give some kind of message if I tried to open the file.  I could however, open the windows partition via the mac side and copy stuff over.
Why this change, puzzles me. I'm thankful whatever happened, that I am able to access and back-up my data.
I'm not worried about further drive loss. As soon as I can get the money together (about $260-$300), I'm sending this over to the apple store and getting the drive replaced.
Some snapshots of tests. These are only from the windows partition I think. I can't get anything at all from the mac side, likely because of program limitations.
Back story before this happened:
I'm certain something is failing either the hard drive or something else with my mac.  I've had problems with it booting shortly after I got it a few years ago. I think I got it around 2010, though have no way to look up exact date at the moment. I worked around the issue by leaving the machine running and only doing hard shutdowns when absolutely unavoidable. To power down, I'd sent the machine to sleep.
Upon starting up I'd either see it hang at the loading screen w/ or without progress bar or just a black screen, monitor completely off but the fans and the hard drive seeming to run, or it would start up okay.  It would often take several attempts to get the mac to boot successfully.
Eventually it got to the point it failed to start up at all.  I resorted to using the mac CD. It tried and failed to repair the drive. I was forced to either install the OS on my external back-up drive or erase the drive and start over.  Since I had almost all of my personal stuff (minus web bookmarks) backed up, I opted for the erase and start over.  I had much less booting problems overall and things seemed overall fine until now. The mac ran slow and felt hot, but not much out of the ordinary.  I did keep my external drive set up to time machine and have it back up on a daily schedule.
Just wondering if anyone else had heard or seen a similar story to mine, or is this a rather unique way for a drive to fail? Or is there something else I need to have looked at as well as the hard drive?  I just don't want to pay so much for a new hard drive and have it fail too if there is some other problem.

Answer 1

Seems my situation is unique? No one can help me?
Anyways an update: I held the Opt, then after it showed bootcamp, I was able to hold down on a set of keys (can't remember what I used) but I got the recovery disk to load.  It would not do anything at all with my mac os hard drive. It wouldn't even let me erase or reformat the drive.
My option left was to find an external drive to install the OS snow leopard disk. I ran into an additional problem that the install disk was scratched. I had to clean it and buff off some of the scratches with toothpaste. That seemed to clean it just enough for the disk to finish a successful installation on the external drive.
From there I was able to format the Mac OS partition.  Now ever since, different error checking software tells me the hard drive is fine?  Should I trust it anymore? This is really odd. How can pending sectors suddenly be fixed by this problem?  Also it shows I have no more bad sectors in the drive.
I still feel skeptical. As far as my files go, looks like time machine can successfully restore my system up to Sept 28 or 29 this year. Everything after that has been backed up under my PC formatted external drive.