2011 21.5" iMac not booting past Apple logo

A friend of mine has had a 21.5" iMac since last fall. It's a 2011 model, which came with Snow Leopard preinstalled; however, as he was eligible for the free upgrade to Lion, I took care of that from him (basically, he's been running 10.7 since day one). It's been working well ever since, and I successfully managed to install Mountain Lion on the machine just a few weeks ago.
Just a few hours ago, Mail started acting up on his machine and I tried to help him. The symptoms, if they're at all relevant, were that a new message composition window wouldn't close if he clicked the "close window" button, and the send button was greyed out. I recommended a restart.
Here's where things got really interesting. The computer froze on the Apple logo. That is to say, initially, after the startup chime, the Apple logo showed up with a spinner; after three or four minutes (already abnormally long), the spinner vanished, but the Apple logo stayed. We left it like that for about a half hour, to no effect. I restarted a few times using the I/O button on the back of the machine, trying to eject any CDs using the "click on restart" trick, holding down the shift key to get into safe mode (with limited success: a loading bar appeared, then nothing happened for 20 minutes, at which point I restarted again) and to zap the PRAM, to no effect. I can't hear the hard drive's head clicking back and forth, as it usually does in my iMac, and tried booting from the recovery CD. Strangely enough, the CD drive spins up, then back down almost immediately, and we're back to square one, with an Apple logo in the middle of the screen.
At this point I'm completely puzzled; I've browed fora and message boards, and so far, nothing I've tried seems to work. My friend is reluctant to go to the Apple store, as he thinks that he'll lose all of his data that way (even though he's got a backup disk set up, with backups from just before the restart, going back about a month). Fact is, I'm not sure that there is a solution at this point, beyond taking the machine, which is still under warranty, to an Apple store.
What would be a good course of action at this point?

I tried starting up in safe mode. The loading bar showed up, filled up, and disappeared, and then, nothing. Just the Apple logo, for at least 20 minutes (I later restarted and tried zapping the PRAM, also without success).

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The operating system was evidently not new enough so once I did what i said at the begining of this post all went well.
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and tired hard to forget.
I hoped this post does not scare away to many people, I was just about done with this computer until I read your post, one of several dozen, and it all came back to me.
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2011 21.5" iMac not booting past Apple logo

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