I currently boot from sdb (because FreeBSD killed my boot from sda). I want to restore the GRUB-MBR to sda.

I tried "man grub-install" but the SuSE people sort of castrated that alleging that YAST could do all and more, better. Fine. When I use YAST's boot loader module it offers to restore the currently active MBR of sdb. No chance to change hard disks.

Any idea how to do it (short of using "dd")?

Unless you have / on sda, a script like yast will usually think it knows better than you.

There is some gimmick in grub.comf
map hd0 hd1
map hd1 hd0

To do exactly what you say in grub-speak. I would consider inserting it, or deleting it.

as for man grub-install, forget it. Grub thinks man pages don't exist; for you are the infinitely infuriating 'info grub' pages :-). Grub & tar are the only programs that come to mind which force users to use info pages. Info pages generally seem to be a maze with no way out.

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Have you tried the standard method? Open a terminal as root user enter grub to get a grub prompt (grub>) then enter:

The example above should install Grub to the mbr of sda pointing to the system partition with boot/kernel file on sdb4. You can use the geometry command at the grub prompt and compare it to your fdisk output to assure that sda is the same as (hd0), which it should be but is not always the same. geoemtry (hd0) at a grub prompt should show you info on partitions as grub sees them for sda. This is for Grub Legacy which I believe Opensuse still uses?

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Well, / is on sda, but I still don't have access to sda's MBR.

No need, I can boot. I just want my MBR restored.

Well and truly spoken . As an aside: the "man" and "info" texts are identical...

@ yancek Thanks a lot. I found that out after I posted though I didn't know the geometry command. And yes, SuSE uses GRUB-legacy, they will probably switch with 12.2. Again, thanks.

Summing up: YAST can't deliver.