I have been using openSUSE since 10.1. I need to reinstall the GRUB bootloader on my 11.3 installation. In the recent past, I would boot from a USB stick into Setup over the network and find the “install bootloader” option. One or two clicks, and I could reboot and GRUB would be back.
I guess that SOMEONE decided that this was too easy a fix, and the option seems to be removed in 11.3. Am I missing something here, or do I have to waste even more of my time and do it the hard way? Why was this removed? It worked great in the past. Is it an impossibility of computer science to include this nice little feature in the 11.3 installer? >: / Maybe I’m not looking in the right place…
I’m not quite clear but it sounds like you were wanting to re-install grub from a net install cd you have loaded on a USB flash drive?
Some of the repair features you may be referring to have been removed.
But this might be easy: Note the need for the version I link to
Re-Install Grub Quickly with Parted Magic
You can do the same with a SUSE live CD too
I’m not quite clear but it sounds like you were wanting to re-install grub from a net install cd you have loaded on a USB flash drive?
Yes sir, basically. I have my openSUSE repos on my FreeBSD server. I boot my workstations off of a USB stick and load the graphical installer off the server.
Anyway, I have been fixing it the “hard” way in the rescue shell, but it was just so nice and easy to have the graphical openSUSE installer fix it for me with one or two clicks. I just don’t understand why the option was removed? Sometimes I need a break from the hell that can be FreeBSD, and so far openSUSE has given me the option of simplifying many trivial things with each release - this feature removal is a disappointment. 
I think that the repair option was removed because the code had gotten really complicated and really never worked all that well for many things. Though the grub restore worked well and maybe should be replaced, most of the other repair options was very much hit or miss.