Imac won't start up!! help!

Ok so I went away on vacation on the weekend shutting my mac down in the regular way.. got home and turned it on last night... nothing!! it's a grey screen with apple logo and swirling progress icon for about 2-3 mins then it shuts off.
I have tried using the install cd for leopard and it tells me that it "must erase my hard drive" which I would prefer was not the only option. It does not list any other option. (when I select the harddrive it has a yellow exclamation mark on it?.. )
I tried using disc utility on it and the only option it allows me to perform is disc verify which fails every time because of a filesystem error.
It will not start in safe mode.
I don't know what else to try and I desperatly need my computer ASAP!! I have a newsletter due tomorrow!!

I am beginning to wonder if there is something going on with either Apple updates or something similar. In the past two weeks I have had two separate IMacs die. One was a Intel system while yesterday a G5 Imac (no camera model) died. The way they died was EXACTLY the same. The Intel system died overnight while the G5 model died during an update but I do not know which update, only that it was part of the Apple Software Update routine.
The symptoms were identical. System froze on "spinning beachball" then when forced shutdown (via power off switch 10 Seconds) and restart began, After about a minute, the computer powered itself off. It never began to read from the hard drive. Booting from any of several CDs resulted in normal boot and staying on. Both Tech Tools Deluxe and Disk Warrior reported hard drive directory errors. Like I said this was identical on both the Intel AND the G5 system. Disk Warrior was able to recover most of the needed data. DW reported that it could not rebuild and replace the directory because of severe errors.
TTD also reported disk errors but offered a chance to rebuild the directory. When tried on the G5 system, this resulted in Kernel Panics or a error message as reported above. Either problem could occur but I could not find out why some of the time it made it KP while other times it failed before even getting to the KP.
In the first case, the Intel, the hard drive was replaced under Apple Care and the system seems to be running okay after being rebuilt. The G5 system is currently waiting to go to the Apple repair franchise in our area.
What scares me is having two different chipped IMacs both fail in a identical manner, at least one of which happened during an update, within a two week period. This is the first time I have seen this unique shutting down because of a bad hard drive problem in more than eight years AND HAVING TWO WITHIN A WEEK OR SO and reading of others having the exact same type problem. Both systems were running 10.4.11 when the problem happened.
Once may be happenstance, twice may be co-incidence but three times (or more) looks like enemy action!

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    Why reward points?(Quoted from Discussions Terms of Use.)
    The reward system helps to increase community participation. When a community member gives you (or another member) a reward for providing helpful advice or a solution to their question, your accumulated points will increase your status level within the community.
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