unable to recreate fat32 partition

[Ivan Zakharyaschev]

        Hello!

I did some stupid things with partitions. I'm sorry for bothering you,
but perhaps you could give some valuable advice.

Here is a short story.

I used parted-1.5.6 to resize a fat32 partition to a smaller size.
It was the first primary partition starting at the very beginning of the
disk. (I don't remember the exact position.)

After the resize operation was complete, I gave a print command and saw
that the size of hda1 remained the same. From the output of some other
parted-command I deduced that the size of the filesystem inside the
partition had been actaully shrinked to the value I requested.

So without thinking much, I decided to recreate the partition of the
right size. But that appeared to be impossible:

rm 1
mkpart primary fat32 0 22.xxx

didn't create the new partition with the same start position as the old
one had. So the filesystem is not recognised as fat32 anymore, has
invalid superblock and can not be mounted anymore.

I tried to use the rescue command:

rm 1
rescue 0 23000

but it didn't find anything.

I tried to recreate the partion with sfdisk, but as far as I don't
remember the exact start position I failed to do the right thing. Or
perhaps the superblock got corrupted, so all my attempts to merely
recreate the partition will be successless...

So now I have several questions I'm worrying about.

Why didn't parted change the size of the partition as it resized its
contents?

Why wasn't it able to recreate the partition with the same start
position after "rm 1"?

Could the fat superblock get corrupted?

Are there any ways to restore the partition? (I'm going to to try
gpart.) Are there any improvemnts in parted-1.6.0 that could help me
fight with this problem?

Many thanks in advance for answers.
Ivan Zakharyaschev