IBook won't boot after broken wireless connection trying to update OS

Trying to help my kid with his iBook via telephone calls. He was updating the OS over a wireless connection, lost the signal which apparently froze the machine. When he rebooted it wouldn't go past the blue start-up screen with a spinning gear. He's used the install disk and disk repair, which said it repaired one volume but not a second one (not sure what that means). But no luck with rebooting back into his machine. He then tried to boot up in "safe mode" but that doesn't work; gets the blue screen and spinning gear again. He's got a lot of stuff on his hard drive and is understandably concerned about the best way to get the machine back to normal and still have the contents of the hard drive. Any suggestions? Thanks in advance for any help.

Really needs to fix that HD, if DU can't do it, try, If DiskWarrior can't fix it, you might try Data Rescue II...
http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/
http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue.php
(Has a Free Demo to see if it could or not, but you'll need another drive to recover to).
Or FileSalvage...
http://www.subrosasoft.com/OSXSoftware/index.php?%20mainpage=product_info&productsid=1
to recover what you can.
If the good partition is the boot partition, then Archive & Install
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107120

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