Help PLEASE starting up my iMac

I have a iMac with OSX 10.5.8 and it will not start up.

All I see is the gray screen. It will not let me start in Safe Mode. I put the start up disk (holding down Option key) in and was able to get to disk utility but says, "the underlying task reported failure on exit" when I try and verify or repair the Hard drive Disk Permissions.

Im not a computer genius by any means....

See screen shots.

Thanks for any of your help !

-Paul

what happens when you try repair disk (tab on bottom left of disk utility)?

6string said:

what happens when you try repair disk (tab on bottom left of disk utility)?

Click to expand...

Both the Repair and Verify-disk (on bottom right) run and then say that there appears to be no problem.

G'day and welcome to the forums.

See if you can boot from the install DVD, hold down the 'C' key after the chimes, and go to Utilities in the Menu Bar and run Repair Disk from there. Could well be the hard drive is on the way out. Keep us posted?