Snow leopard can't be installed on my machine.

Alright, here goes. Thank you in advance.
BACK STORY:
I have an Intel iMac. I've had it for a few years and it's always been awesome. I was running Leopard, and it was all gravy. So much so, that I even took it in to my Apple store to see if there was anything I needed to do to protect my machine, or if there were any updates for my machine that I should purchase. Dude at genius bar said yea, there is an iLife update and a new version of OS, Snow Leopard. He told me he would update my macbook (which was getting a new hard drive put in) for me and show me how to do it, so that when I got home with my iMac, I could do the same update to it. iLife 11 and Snow Leopard installed perfectly on my Macbook (my secondary computer). I tried to installed Snow Leopard verbatim what the Apple associate showed me, with his written directions. Popped in my disc, selected English, install began, got about 1/3 of the way through the progress bar and an error message came up reading "Snow Leopard can't be installed on this machine". Interesting. Apple store guy said I was good to go?
DIAGNOSIS FROM APPLE STORE:
I took my iMac back to the apple store the next day, with my macbook incase I needed to run a firewire from iMac to Macbook to transfer files. Dude tried to save some of my data but couldn't access it. He told me there was a OS conflict and he was unable to archive and install. He gave me a card with all the information for a data recovery service and told me I was SOL. Great. I took my mac in to make sure it was good to update, he said yes, and then I did it, in turn frying my main computer into a useless paperweight.
FUNCTIONALITY:
When I try to turn on my iMac now, it goes to a grey screen with an apple and a spinning gear. This screen stays up for about 45 seconds and then the computer shuts off. I've connected a firewire to the iMac and my Macbook and held the T key down in an effort to save my photos and music etc. The firewire symbol comes up on the iMac, but nothing appears in my finder on my Macbook like an external hard drive would. If I put the Snow Leopard disc in, and hold the T key, the Snow Leopard disc will show up in my Macbook's finder/desktop. If I put the Snow Leopard disc in the iMac and boot it up the computer just shuts down, even if I hold the C key. If I boot with the Leopard disc and hold C, the disc will mount and I can re-install Leopard, but I get a warning that all of my data will be erased in doing so. Obviously I don't want to part with 200+ GB of data. My last back up was about a month before all this so it won't be the end of the world but there are photos and other things that are recent to my hard drive with no back up and that I'd rather not lose if I don't have to.
BASIC INFORMATION:
I'm 24 with a bachelors degree and I am very comfortable with my mac. AKA you don't have to reply like you're teaching your grandma how to email.
My iMac IS an Intel iMac.
I have 47 GB of free space on it, plenty of room for an OS update.
Firewire ports are FW400 on both computers.
I had to archive and install Leopard once about a year ago on my iMac. Not sure why there was issue, but the problem was fixed when I did this.
So, do I have any options here besides erasing my hard drive? Has anyone ran into this before. Sorry for the rant. Thank you again.

Attach an external hard drive to the iMac. Boot from the Snow Leopard disc again, launch Disk Utility, go into the Restore tab, select the internal drive as the source, select the external drive as the destination, and restore. Then partition -- do not merely erase -- the internal drive, and see whether you can install onto it. If you can, use Migration Assistant to restore your data from the backup.
Not backing up = inevitable data loss.

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    Models
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    MacBook (Late 2008 Aluminum, or Early 2009 or newer)
    MacBook Pro (Mid/Late 2007 or newer)
    Xserve (Early 2009)
    MacBook Air (Late 2008 or newer)
    Mac mini (Early 2009 or newer)
    Mac Pro (Early 2008 or newer)

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