After quite a few hurdles I brought my system back to life.
here is what I did:
- repaired MBR of sdb with windows recovery CD to start only windows 7. I needed 2 iterations to have it fully fixed.
- restart into win7 launched the last bit of re-partition software I was using. restart again into normal bootable win7
- reboot with opensuse live CD. I did not use the updategrub package, but directly the instructions for grub as described here
Programming and Linux: Solution: Grub issues in opensuse with dual boot(XP, Vista, Win7)
menu.lst was at (hd1,6)
-reboot and grub was there, but oh no! opensuse only boots into recovery mode with:
Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open /dev/sdb11
/dev/sdb11:The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext4filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext4 filesystem ( and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblockis corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock: e2fsck -b 8193 <device>
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it turns out that the resizing of partitions (or windows startup recovery?) changed partition numbers. sdb11, 10 and 9 were swaped
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edit of /etc/fstab to correct this
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reboot and back to normal.
Thank you please_try_again, flymail and robin_listas for your help and support!