Permanent flashing globe at start up

Hello, I hope someone can help me on this. First off, sorry I do not have model information, I cannot get on my imac to confirm it. I purchased it (24" widescreen model, silver casing) in 2008. Here is the problem.
I went on a 3 day vacation to vegas, I left my computer on as usual. When I arrived home, it was frozen on one of the screen saver pictures. I had to power off the computer manually. When I restarted, I held the option key and instead of getting a couple disk icons to select between my OS X and Windows XP, I got a blank grey screen. I tried again, same thing. I tried without holding option, and got a black screen and message stating there was no bootable disk (this would be on the windows side of things). Restarted again, held option, got the grey screen and decided to wait. About 10 minutes later a flashing globe appeared. I researched this and understand that the computer is trying to boot from a non-existent network disk. I am not sure how this preference was changed. The solution is to change the preference. The problem is in all the solutions I encoutnered, the flashing globe eventually goes away, followed by a question mark and then finally start up. Mine remained as a flashing globe for 10 hours overnight, so I am at a loss on how to correct it.
Any explanations or links to explanations for my specific situation would be greatly appreciated. Also, if the explanation does not involved wiping the computer that would be great as I have many family memories on the computer I would be very happy to get back. Thank again for your time.

Couple of suggestions you can try.
1.
a) Hold down 'Command' + 'S' before Apple startup sound.
b) At the command line, type "/sbin/fsck -fy" (without quotes) to repair the disk.
2.
a) Hold down 'Shift' before Apple startup sound. This boots your machine in 'Safe Mode'.
b) Log-in and reboot.
Good luck. Let us know how it works out.

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