Tried almost everything, iMac (2008) still stuck at startup (Apple logo)

My iMac from 2008, currently running 10.6 but was originally a 10.5, has been stuck on the white screen + Apple logo with no spinning beach ball.
There were no troubles before this, I just turned it on one morning to it like this.
I've practically tried everything to no avail...
Safe boot: goes back to Apple logo
Option key: the HD is shown, but goes back to Apple screen when clicked
NVRAM/PRAM reset: did nothing but make the volume and screen brightness back to default
Verbose mode: gets stuck on "Executing fsck_hfs..." and doesn't proceed whatsoever, even after hours of it being on
Single User mode: same as Verbose mode. Just stuck, never proceeding.
Sometimes it goes on a restart loop until I stop it with a NVRAM/PRAM reset.
Sometimes it beeps 2 times, then goes on to 3 beeps until turned off (RAM problems?) but not all the time.
I'm thinking I should just do a complete and clean reinstall of the OS to see if it'll help...but my optical drive hasn't been working for a while now, so I can't just stick in the CD...
Is it worth it to go and buy an external CD/DVD reader and try to do a clean reinstall from that? Is that even possible?
Have an idea on what might be causing this? RAM? Corrupted files??
Should I suck it up and go to the Apple store? (Which I'm trying to avoid, as an iMac is heavy and I have no car)
Any help will be grately appreciated!
Thanks for reading.

I fixed it!
I thought I would post what I did in case anyone else in the future has the same problems as me.
I went out and got an external CD/DVD drive and plugged it in with the first install disc that came with my Mac. (The grey CDs with 10.5, not the 10.6 upgrade DVD)
Pressing C on startup didn't work, so I pressed D instead and got the Apple Hardware Test. After testing, I got a 4MEM error, which means it was the RAM.
Tested one RAM at a time, and it seems like one of them had stopped working. I also tested the good RAM in both slots in case it was the slots that were erroring, and not the sticks.
Then, I booted up my Mac again with the good stick of RAM, pressed C, and went into Disk Utility. There, I verified and repaired the disk (there were some errors there too, but it fixed it up).
I rebooting the Mac with one stick of RAM, and it started with no problem!
But because I'm only running on 1GB, things are a bit sluggish, so I'm going to use this opportunity to upgrade my RAM. All is right in the world again.

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