Power Mac won't boot up

Hi, Folks! I've had this Mac Pro 2.8GHz since 2008 and rarely had a problem. Last night, the clock was wrong (for the first time ever); it said it was a few hours later than it was. And I couldn't reset it in System Preferences. I re-booted and the cycle began:
-I get the grey screen, with the Apple and the spinning wheel. This lasts for about a minute
-The screen goes black, the CPU winds down and it starts up again.
-I get the grey screen, with the Apple and the spinning wheel. This lasts for about a minute
-The screen goes black, and so on...
It sounds like it's pushing a rock up a hill and instead of reaching the top, it suddenly falls off the side and has to be pushed up again--only to fall off again. The fans are working and I hear the usual start-up noises--but not much else.
I've booted from the Install Disk and run Disk Utility (it repaired some things, but to no avail). I've run a Hardware Test, which it passed. I've zapped the NVRAM. No luck.
I've run out of options. Any suggestions?
(BTW, I'm in Brooklyn and therefore got hit hard by Hurricane Sandy. However, we never lost power--and I actually had my computer and power strip off during the worst of it. What happened to me last night was a good two days after the storm had passed.)
Thanks!

The "crunching" is more likely the stepping motor in the hard drive, the processor should be silent.  And since you can boot from the DVD then the logic board should not be an issue.  Sounds an awful lot like a bad hard drive.  Do you have more than one hard drive in the Mac Pro?  If so, can you install a bootable copy of the Mac OS X on a second drive and try starting from that drive?
If not, then it seems like the options are to buy another hard drive to install and install the operating system on, or take the Mac to an Apple store and have the techs run some of their diagnostics to see if it isn't a bad hard drive.  They have much better diagnostics than the AHT...but getting into the City is pretty iffy right now.  An option is also to order an external drive and install Mac OS X on it, make that the startup disk, and see how it works.
I would guess the order of options by cost would be:
1.  Apple store for testing
2.  New internal hard drive
3.  External hard drive.
I have gotten three eternal drives from OWC for my Macs and been really pleased...cost is reasonable, around $200 for 2 TB, and they are compatible.  OWC also has internal drives so you can check and see what they cost.

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