moving (and losing?) partitions with cfdisk

[Levi Waldron <onemorenut@gmail.com>]

I had some unused space at the beginning of my hard drive, with my
partition table looking something like:

5700MB   free space
hda5     logical     linux ext3 [/home]
hda6     logical     linux swap
hda2     primary   linux ext3 [/]
hda1     primary   other OS

I wanted to use the free space, so I booted up Knoppix and used cfdisk
created two new partitions, putting th.  But this moved my existing
hda5 and hda6 to hda7 and hda8.  No problem, I thought, I mounted the
root fs and updated fstab and grub.  Then I tried mounting home, and
got a very scary error:

(nb. I chrooted into hda2 first)

#mount /home
mount:  wrong fs tyupe, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hda7.
missing codepage or other error
(could this be the IDE device where you in fact use
ide-scsi so that sr0 or sda or so is needed?)
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail  or so

And e2fsck doesn't recognize it:

#e2fsck /dev/hda7
e2fsck 1.39-WIP (31-Dec-2005)
e2fsck: Invalid argument while trying to open /dev/hda7

The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext23
filesystem.  If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2
filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the
superblock is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an
alternate superblock:
     e2fsck -b 8193 <device>


I'm still in Knoppix and haven't touched the modified partitions, so
can I get my home partition back?  Why did t his happen?