HELP Mac desktop stuck at start up

its my fathers computer. desktop. i dont know much about Mac computers. i think its a Tiger. hes had it for many years. please use laymans terms and be very detailed, step by step.
the mac was working as of last night. this morning when he went to turn it on, the startup grey screen with apple logo and gear appeared for a long time (usually lasts no longer than 5 seconds) and after awhile a light blue screen appears and sometimes stays like that and sometimes the progress bar appears then it goes to a black screen with alot of white text about an inode i think. i started the computer pressing COMMAND and C, and the prompt came up and i got lost because i didnt know what to do. i typed in diskutil info/ and it took me to a page with alot of options like repairPermissions and VerifyPermissions but i wasnt sure what to do. i tried typing in...diskutil repairpermissions and it said ownership of affected file is required so i didnt know what that meant. he unplugged the printed and external hard drive and the modem so nothing else is really plugged in. its all hooked up through a serge protector if that matters. (has been since forever.) he tried putting in the installation disk then we turned the computer off with the disk inside the drive. we turned the computer on then pressed C after we heard the start up chime. it spit the disk out and the computer turned off. it came with another disk that was a version older and had hardware test on it i think. im not sure if that could do anything, ive searched all over the internet and everything i could understand ive tried to do but failed. if we cannot get it fixed ourselves well call apple in a few days or take it to the store to get it checked out soon. we want to get it fixed ourselves. can all the songs, pictures, things scanned, documents, etc can they be saved somehow? its very important.
any ideas anyone? please be specific on what to do.

Might try this if you havent, though tough to tell what might happen...
Reset OS X Password Without an OS X CD...
http://theappleblog.com/2008/06/22/reset-os-x-password-without-an-os-x-cd/
Though if you can afford a version of DisjWarrior for that OS, that may bea better answer...
You must repair the HD, your best bet is likely DiskWarrior.
BTW, you might enjoy these DiskWarrior review/recommendations...
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=9645801&#9645801
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=10541019#10541019
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=11918925&#11918925
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=12684129#12684129
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=12744794&#12744794
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=12912879#12912879
You must repair the HD, if Disk Utility or fsck should fail to repair it, your best bet is DiskWarrior from Alsoft, you'll need the CD to boot from if you don't have another boot drive...
http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/

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HELP Mac desktop stuck at start up

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