Question : Problem: iMac Won't Boot

I have been working with PC for years but am new to Macs.  So i wanted to get a little advice before i went any further.

The computer is an Intel iMac EMC No. 2114.
The user doesn't know what happened to cause it to mess up, but i suspect it is a hardware failure.
One boot up it just has the spinning thing ( don't know how to describe it ) and after maybe 1-3min it will turn itself off.
I booted from the OSX install disk, went into the disk utility, which took about 5min for it to pull up the disk information, from their i tried to do a repair but it kept failing and saying "1 volume could not be repaired because of an error"

My questions is this;

1. How can i get the Mac loading again?
2. How can i recover the information the person has stored?

Thank you!

Answer : Problem: iMac Won't Boot

If you can get hold of a USB or firewire drive you could install a clean copy of the OS from the system disk onto that, reboot from it and if there's room you may be able to copy the contents of the failing disk on it or onto another disk depending on how bad it is.

To reboot from the firewire/USB disk after you've installed the OS, hold down the alt key at restart and select the alternative drive.