IMac won't start up Mac OS X - Restarts over and over again

Last night when I put my iMac to sleep, the screen turned off but then the fans kicked into overdrive and the computer was unresponsive. This has happened before (once in a blue moon), so I just manually shut it down and went to bed. When I turned it back on this morning, it boot up normally and all of my startup applications opened. Then when I went to open Safari, its dock icon would blink but never actually open. Force quit failed from every possible direction, then Activity Monitor would do the same thing. These also prevented me from logging out or restarting, so again, I had to manually shut it down when it became evident the problem was not going to resolve itself.
Upon pressing the power button and starting it again, the iMac would load the grey Apple screen with the spinning gear, but after about a minute and a half restart on its own, over and over like Groundhog's Day. I tried resetting the SMU - nothing. I tried resetting the PRAM - nothing. I tried staring in Safe Mode - nothing. Where do I go from here??

So I fixed the restart problem. It was some sort of mounting error that was remedied when I reinstalled Tiger from my original grey disks. I chose Archive and Install, like I have done in the past with my PB, and am left in a state of confusion. Rounding off to even numbers, I probably had 30 GB of music, 35 GB of video and 50 GB of photos. Expecting those to be gone, I was able to transfer them to an external a friend let me borrow, in hopes of copying them all back to my disk if the archive and install worked. Well, it did to the point that I am running a fully operational OS X.
So, I now have two questions:
- If all of those files are nowhere to be found in Finder/Spotlight/anywhere, why do I only have 14 out of an original 150 GB hard drive?
- Is there a way to gain permissions to the files and folders in "Previous Systems," even if there may be nothing in them?
Sorry this was long-winded, just trying to keep all up to speed. Thanks again for any assistance.

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