IMac stalled and now is stuck on grey screen

So, I got on my iMac(2008 I believe; it's got the black border, pretty sure it's got a core2duo processor. Running mountain lion) and while the screen was on, nothing was working. The desktop was completely frozen, the mouse wasn't moving, and the keyboard provided no response. So, I reset the system, and it hung up at the grey screen, with the apple logo and spinning wheel.
after a few minutes I reset it again, and had the same issue. I tried loading up a backup, and the one from when I installed ML showed up, but after selecting it, nothing happened.
So I tried safe booting it. No effect, other than it takes longer before the wheel appears.
Next step was resetting the PRAM. First couple of attempts didn't result in a reset, so I moved on to the SMC.
After resetting the SMC, I still saw no improvement to my situation, so I tried resetting the PRAM. This time it did reset, but the computer still hangs up.
Now, I'm not really experienced in all this stuff, but I tried taking a peek in verbose mode... things got interesting here... things seem to load up like normal until it gets to a line along the lines of "USBMSC non-unique identifier ############### device not responding"(Sorry, going by memory here, no computer at home). This line begins repeating to infinity, with the occasional "timed out" message thrown in for good measure.
Now, there's nothing plugged into my computer, I haven't had any issues leadinig up to this, and I haven't recently installed new hardware or software. I tried holding down cmnd-option-o-f, but nothing happened. I had to get back to the office, so maybe I just didn't hit the buttons properly. If I get into openfirmware, is there anything I can do from there?
I don't have regular access to another mac. And, seeing as I work, it's not that easy for me to get in to the genius bar.
Thanks for whatever help you guys can provide!
edit: upon further reading, I see that I may not have tried safe mode properly. the instructions I read said to hold shift from before pressing the power button, now I see some instructions that say to wait until you hear the tone. So I will try that when I get home.... but please, feel free to throw in any theories until then!
edit2: if I ever got a restore disk, I don;t know where it is now.
edit3: 2009 iMac, not 2008. It's 27 inches.

Try booting with Command + R depress to enter the Recovery Partition.
Then start Disk Urtility and repair the disk.
Allan

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If you use a wireless keyboard, trackpad, or mouse, replace or recharge the batteries. The battery level shown in the Bluetooth menu item may not be accurate.
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Reinstall the OS. If the Mac was upgraded from an older version of OS X, you’ll need the Apple ID and password you used to upgrade.
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Step 11
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IMac stalled and now is stuck on grey screen

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