well, I figured part of it out. While doing backups /var filled up and for some reason that caused the system to freeze. I cleaned it up and /var/tmp (which caused the problem) is now pointing to a folder on a 120GB HD so that will no longer be a problem. Then, php stopped working on the reboot, so I recompiled that and apache was happy, but since I lost my 100 day uptime I decided to update my kernel. everything went good, made some speed modifications, rebooted. caput! :(
grub will not load and I have yet to figure out why. 8 hours of working on it, 2 hours of website uptime during that, and now I shall go back at it as soon as I get home.