Mountain Lion update, and now computer won't start up?

Writing this for a friend, as his computer is inop at the moment. Hence this message.
He has a new 27" iMac. He upgraded to Mountain Lion a few weeks ago, and then had intermittent problems with apps unexpectantly shutting down.
Now he did a ML update this morning, and his computer won't start up. It gets to the point of the Apple logo coming up, a progress bar, and then the spinning wheel, but then shuts itself down right afterwards.
A safe boot yields the exact same result.
Any thoughts out there on what he could try to get it up and running again?
Thanks much for any and all help.

Thank you for the fast response.
He was able to get into Disk Utility with the Command and R keys, but when he tried verifying the disk, in red it said 'Invalid Node Structure, volume could not be verified completely'.
He went ahead and verified it anyway, then proceeded to repair it. Howver, it stopped repairing, said it cannot repair, and that he should back up files and reformat the disk.
How can he back up his files? He cannot see a way to do it. Is there anything else he can do besides having to reformat the disk?
This is his first Mac (after much prompting from me to go Mac), and he's afraid he's now lost everything on there.

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http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1923
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Unfortunately you got caught up in the minor miracle of Rosetta. Originally licensed by Apple when it migrated from the PowerPC CPU platform that it had used from the mid-1990's until the Intel CPU platform in 2006, Rosetta allowed Mac users to continue to use their library of PPC software transparently in emulation.
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[click on images to enlarge]
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RainbowGarner wrote:
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Mountain Lion update, and now computer won't start up?

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