..thanks for the suggestion. I looked through the start up messages again and found a line stating that the / filesystem had not been cleanly unmounted (from the freeze I guess). I loaded up the rescue disk and ran the reiserfsck - everything looked clean.
I then ran reiserfsck --check which then moaned about some corruption. I then followed with reiserfsck --fix-fixable which then supposedly fixed the error. I reran with the check option once more - it still complained and now said I would have to run reiserfsck --rebuildtree. I did this and it promptly gave a segmentation fault. I can no longer mount the partition or do anything else with it. I have a feeling I'm looking at a reinstall
I sure am glad I seperate my filesystems onto different partitions else I would have lost everything!
I gotta say I'm a bit disappointed in resierfs - i never had these issues with ext3 even after repeated power outs - could always recover. However my knowledge of th reiser filesystem is limited and I guess the fault could well lie in my hardware - time will tell !
many thanks for help though - guess its reinstall time !