IMac not booting/finding HDD? White screen on Boot

Hi
Upgraded to Yosemite on launch day and the iMac has been fine up until last Monday.
We had a power cut and the iMac was on at the time. Since then, any time I try to switch it on I get a white screen.
I've created a Yosemite boot drive on my memory stick and it finds it. Gone into Disk Utility and it says the drive is damaged and backup any data is can.
Are the power cut and HDD failure connected or could it be something to do with Yosemite?
Its asking me to backup the data on the HDD but is this possible if I cant boot into it?
Thanks

I reopened the imac, removed the optical drive (hdd was already out). Restarted with my USB external HDD connected, nothing happened, white screen still. I then reconnected the friend's USB HDD also and restarted and got the screen to choose a startup disk.
Computer then boots fine from my external hdd. Turn it off, reinstall my HDD and optical drive.
Turn it on again and am greeting with the same blank white screen again.
I then remove the optical drive again and am able to boot from the internal drive. BUT when I go to system preferences to change startup disk, if I check the internal drive or the external USB drive and click reset I got the error "building boot caches on boot helper partition failed". I have no idea what is going on. I repair permissions several times.
I then restart the computer several times and it seems to restart consistently from the internal drive. I then put the optical drive back in and it now appears to be working.
The original external drive I booted from was a 10.5 macbook pro cloned drive. So I don't know if that somehow corrupted my 10.8 imac drive or some firmware that made it such that it wouldn't boot.
What a hassle.
And for anyone who cares and has read this far, I am living in a remote town in Mongolia at the time and didn't have any suction cups to remove the front glass from the imac. I do have an iSesamo tool to open up ipod touches and such, and was able to use that to get the front glass off.
If anyone has an idea of what happened I'd be interested in hearing.

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I then restart the computer several times and it seems to restart consistently from the internal drive. I then put the optical drive back in and it now appears to be working.
The original external drive I booted from was a 10.5 macbook pro cloned drive. So I don't know if that somehow corrupted my 10.8 imac drive or some firmware that made it such that it wouldn't boot.
What a hassle.
And for anyone who cares and has read this far, I am living in a remote town in Mongolia at the time and didn't have any suction cups to remove the front glass from the imac. I do have an iSesamo tool to open up ipod touches and such, and was able to use that to get the front glass off.
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IMac not booting/finding HDD? White screen on Boot

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