IMac HD crashed, can't figure how to recover

I've had my iMac for a little over two years now. Until recently it was running seamlessly. I updated the OS to 10.6 (Snow Leopard) in October and there were a few kinks but I managed to work them out. A couple weeks ago I went to turn it on and it froze. I restarted it and it wouldn't get off the whiet screen with the apple on it. So I continued to troubleshoot and then instead of the apple it was just a white screen. It would sit like that for hours if it could. I tried the restart holding cmdctrl+PR and no luck. Tried restarting holding the option key and no luck finding the HD there or when I did it wouldn't let me into it. I tried to reboot the whole system to factory standard, and still couldn't find the HD to do that. At least wanted to back up my system on my external HD but it wouldn't let me do that either. Is there any other way to recover my iMac, I'm really not wanting to buy a new one yet after only two years of use. My last Mac at least gave me five good years before it crashed (even though I wasn't able to recover anything from that one either). Please help. I at least want to recover my photos of my kids and my music.

Unfortunately, hard drives can fail (or have data corruption) with no warning, which is why everyone should use Apple's built-in Time Machine to back up to an external drive. It is quite possible that your hard drive has failed.
What you should try is to start up from the Mac OS X installation disc. If Snow Leopard is the current OS, use the disc for Snow Leopard. Insert the disc and start up with the C key held down.
You will eventually get to the first Installer screen (after selecting language). Go up to the menu bar and under Utilities, select to run Disk Utility. If you see the internal drive in the sidebar, that is good. If you see the internal drive in the sidebar, and it has +Macintosh HD+ indented under the drive, that's even better.
Select the drive in the sidebar and go to the +First Aid+ tab. Run +Repair Disk+. Take note of any reported errors, and if errors are reported, note if they are repaired. After it completes, quit Disk Utility and Installer, and attempt to start up normally.
If the internal drive does not appear in the sidebar of Disk Utility at all, if you are not able to run +Repair Disk+, or if +Repair Disk+ reports errors that are not repaired, please post back with the details.

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