Keep getting disk errors, what is this?

I have a MacBook Pro 5,1 running 10.6.2, and for the last month and a half my hard drive has been giving me troubles. I've partitioned and re-partitioned several times during this period: I originally had a Windows 7 Boot Camp partition, which I erased and installed Ubuntu (yuck, shouldn't have done that) then deleted that partition, created one for Fedora, deleted that one too, and created a new one for Windows 7 again. However, before I'm able to partition, I've been having to boot from my OS X install disc and repair my drive first, if I don't, I get the error, "Partition failed: Could not modify partition map because filesystem verification failed." After I repair, I'm able to partition once successfully, but the next time around, it fails again. This doesn't seem normal and I'm wondering if the hard drive itself may be on the verge of failing.



I do regular backups to my 1TB Seagate external 1394 drive, so not really concerned about losing anything if it does fail, I'm just wondering if it's imminent failure or just me doing it wrong. Confused.