Your best shot is to use the "file" command on the suspect files. This may tell you what they are. The "strings" command is also handy since it tries to display printable strings in binary files. With any luck, you will be able to identify the critical files and restore/rename them and they won't be corrupt. However, those types of crashes are pretty nasty. Hope you have a backup of your system! I would suggest that you convert to EXT3 at some future point. It seems to be more robust than standard EXT2 given that I've had similar situations with EXT3 and not lost anything. A UPS is expensive, but a good investment if you have frequent power outages. I plan on getting one myself in the near future since this area is known for brown outs and short power outages. Anyway, good luck.
