IMac G5 won't boot to hard drive or cd

Please, someone help me.
My iMac G5 crashes (power is lost completely) during boot every time, about 10 seconds after the cog-wheel progress indicator comes on. When I try booting to a cd by holding down the option key, the only boot device that shows is the hard drive.
I have replaced the ram.....twice. No luck. And, yes, I pushed the ram in really hard.
I hooked my hard drive up to my friends hackintosh to use the disc utiliity and this is what I get:
"Invalid Key Lenght
Invalid node structure
Volume check failed
Filesystem verify or repair failed"
I bought the imac off craigs list a year ago, and I didn't get the original leopard disc, but I've tried diskwarrior and other bootable repair tools, and the mac never seems to see them. I've even tried using them in an external CD drive with no luck. I don't want to go buy OS X if my mac isn't going to read the disc.
Any suggestions as to what is going wrong and how I can fix it?

Thanks for posting back, gld your problems were solved. It's always a good idea to have an external firewire backup/clone (I use SuperDuper!), you could have booted from that.

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Welcome to the Discussions.
See if the suggestions in this article, especially the resetting of the PRAM and power manager help:
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Message was edited by: jpl

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...this worked for 48 hours at which time the problem came back...
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Try here > Tutorial: Avoiding and eliminating Kernel panics | MacFixIt - CNETReviews
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Here's more at a brody's KP site.
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IMac G5 won't boot to hard drive or cd

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