Imac intel won't restart, I get gray screen and spinning wheel then shut off

My imac intel only restart after running disk utility, otherwise I get a gray screen with apple logo and spinning wheel then after about 2min it shuts off.  this all started after a power outage.  I have tried everything that I have read online to fix this, it seems doing a clean install is last resort. Does anyone have any other options for me?

nessman wrote:
I have tried disconnecting the periperals, restarting in "safe boot", resetting the pram and I tried starting up in single user mode.  It will only start up if I start up from the original gray 10.4 start up disk and run "repair disk"....I get errors including "The underlying task reported failure on exit".  I then eject the disk and restart and it works fine but if I have to shut down or restart for any reason it's back to the gray screen.
Your system profile confirms you are using OS 10.5.8.  Boot up from your OS 10.5.x install dvd.  Use the "repair disk" setting.  If you get the same error, then run Apple Hardware Test from your original system dvd.

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