Well, I'm kinda late tuning in (might have saved some time, but igenixia figured it out, well done!), but for the FAQ just simply say,

If you see this:

   fsck.ext2: Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open /dev/hda4



then do this:

   fsck.ext2 -fay -b 32768 /dev/hda4

Cheers

EDIT: added -fay to the above