I'm a complete idiot, help!

I had this problem and the only way around it was actually booting off of an external hard drive with the install disks imaged onto the hard drive.

Do you have another mac available where you could do this?
 
Well. In a couple of weeks I'll be getting a spanking PC system at a budget of around 1.3k.

I'm reluctant to purchase anything to get this sorted because it'll eat into my PC budget. What I may do is buy the PC system. Then build up more funds and try purchasing a HDD for the method Gommsta suggested using a pre-formatted External HDD and possibly also purchasing a set of snow leopard disks and see if it'll boot of those.
 
You need to hold C the moment after you press the power button, I just keep hold of it until I hear the disk spin up - it's worth noting that the OSX install disk can take a few minutes to load, about 3-4 minutes here iirc.

If/when you get into the install disk, it's just a case of Utilities->Disk Utility and then removing the existing partitions and creating a new HFS partition and re-installing.

Then setup Time Machine :P
 
Borrow a hard disk from your mate and shove an image of leopard onto it. Then boot with it and install to your own hard drive.
 
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I don't think you can assume your optical drive is working when 4/5 different disks all failed, sounds like your troubleshooting the right stuff but without knowing if the stuff your connecting is known good its all a waste and hypotetical, you need a known good bootable disk (optical or magnetic) and you need to try booting from that, it sounds like there is a problem with the optical drive and thats whats stopping you from using it to fix the hard disk. I suggest you get those disks in another mac to test them or use a firewire cable and target disk mode to use another mac's optical drive to boot.
 
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