EMac won't boot up

I have an eMac, OS 10.4, that won't boot up. It's stuck with logo of Apple and little spinning gear below. I tried booting up from System CD holding down C key, but after 1st disk I get a message that says there was an error and to try again. I try again and get same message. I'm thinking it may work if choose the option of erasing entire hard drive and starting over again. However, I'm reluctant to do this because my children have valuable pics on the HD. Any ideas?

When does the error message come up when you try to boot from your OS X 10.4 Install DVD? "After the first disk" suggests you may have the 10.4 Media Exchange set of CDs; if you can boot from the first one, go to the Installer menu and select Disk Utility to run Repair Disk on the internal HD.
If you still cannot boot from the OS X Install disc, try booting into single-user mode and running the file system check utility.
Repeat Repair Disk or fsck until it reports no problems.
See Using Disk Utility and fsck.

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    Jon:
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