Over the new year weekend I left my work machine at office turned on. On returning to office on Monday I found my PC had crashed corrupting my Eclipse workbench. I just couldn't start the eclipse,it would hang as soon as I started it with my old workspace to use.

A simple solution I found was as follows.

1. Backup your workspace first.
2. From the old workspace delete the following folder path_to_workspace/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.resources, this only deletes all the project's corrupted metadata. your projects remain intact.
   
3. Start eclipse.
4. Re-import all your projects, so it will recreate the metadata for all the projects again.

hopefully by now you must have a workable eclipse running :).