10.5.3 update failed mac wont boot

I have only been using a mac for about 6 months, i think they are great, however I dont know what to do with a problem that I am having.

I was using my macbook 1.8 intel with leopard and it said to update, so I said yes and let it do its thing. about 5-10 minutes into the update it failed and asked me to restart. I restarted thinking it would try again but then it never booted back up. it kept sitting at the apple logo with the gears turning, and after about 2 minutes the macbook turns off.

I tried to research this and i didnt not find too much info. I asked a few friends and they said to try holding down c during boot. that did nothing. also x did nothing. and a few other keyboard keystrokes during boot didnt work.

Has anyone seen this issue and how would I resolve it? I tried to read the hard drive on another mac but it wasnt able to read it. the other mac was tiger. windows pcs wasnt able to read it either. is there a recovery option on the leopard cd? if i reinstall leopard how do i get my info off of the old hard drive?

Thanks for all you mac pros help!

Welcome to Mac-Forums!

Give these a try first.
Resolve startup issues and perform disk maintenance with Disk Utility and fsck

Some startup commands for you.
Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts

thanks for the links, i will give it a try and let you all know how it turned out. im on my way to my brothers to try to boot as a hard drive with a firewire cable I hope that works as well.

if you will reinstal leopard did you ever had time machine on with an external hard drive ? i think there is an option to restore all with time machine