Check out the topic Resetting the Suspect Status in the BOL. This is a stored procedure which will reset the status. I'm not sure where you're going to go from there. You could try DBCC CHECKTABLE() or DBCC CHECKALLOC() to see if one of those two could repair the corruption.

Your best bet is to restore the database from a backup.

>> Also, due to the tardiness of myt software supplier, have not got a back up of this new database (over 18 million records imported over the last fortnight, awaiting SQL Agent for veritas backup)

You could have done manual backups or manually scheduled a backup - sorry.

>Is there anything I can do or is it a start from scratch job?

I'd still leave this option open.

-Mike