iMac Hard disk error

Well I haven't been around here before but I actually don't know where to turn to, this is my first time owning a mac, its the white imac, the one that came out right before the aluminum one =P, but yeah it has a 250gb hard drive and I partitioned it to be 200gb for mac and the rest for windows vista, however yesterday i was no longer able to boot to either one. i tried throwing in the mac os x snow leopard disk and did the disk utility thing, however what i found was rather suprising. the bootcamp partition seems fine but the macintosh was greyed out, i attempted a repair and it says that the partition table was broke and it recommended that i reformat. however this isn't really an option for me since i have some data that i would like to save on it, i would really appreciate some advice or anything at all that can help me solve my problem thanks in advance =D