Is hard drive dying?  How to get it fixed

My 7 month old imac 9,1 has been having a lot of problems, and they are getting worse.
In September or so, it began to freeze at sleep occasionally, then at startup. the spinning cursor would come up for a minute or so, but it would eventually start. eventually, however, it refused to start and entered a permanent loop of restarting itself. I therefore reformatted it, reinstalled OS, and restored from time capsule.
Same thing happened in October. freezing, then slow restarts with spinning, then failure to restart period.
Now, its happened twice in December. I am now reinstalling OS and files onto an external Hard drive to help determine whether the internal drive is the problem. I briefly ran tech tool and it found a few hundred bad blocks, but checked less than 1% of the drive.
does it sound like a dead/dying drive? How does apple handle these things?

I have a a problem a bit like the one described previously.
In Set. 2007 I bought my first mac...an iMac 24".
3-4 months later I had trouble with my HD. The tech support told me that my HD was damaged and could not be fixed. They couldn`t explain why, but they changed my old HD with a new one and problem solved.
Last month as I was installing the snow leopard operating sistem my iMac froze in the midle of the instalation procedure. I turned it off holding down the power button, and when I turned the power back on I got that flashing folder with a question mark in the middle. In short...after trying everything (formating, partitioning etc) I took it to the shop to hava a look.
The tech guy just got off the phone with me saying that my HD was damaged and could not be repaired. The only solution is to replace it with a new one.
In 2 years I had to change 2 HD`s!!!!
My only guess is that bootcamp might have something to do with it cause it frooze the computer lots of times requiring me to turn it off by pressing and holding down the power button one to many times.
Does anybody know any other reason for this to have happended?
Could the installation of snow leopard have had anything to do with this?

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