grub-probe, but in reverse?

[Colin Watson]

  $ sudo grub-probe -d /dev/sda1 -t drive
  (hd0,1)

I have a reason to want to do the reverse of this: I have a
libparted-based program that ensures that at least one partition on a
disk is marked active (needed for some BIOSes), and would like to call
it on the disk selected for installation of GRUB in d-i. Of course
libparted is only going to understand OS device names. If possible I'd
rather avoid reading device.map by hand to figure out how to map (hd0,1)
back to /dev/sda1. Is there any way to do this with the code as it
stands, and if not would it make sense to make it possible to pass GRUB
device names to grub-probe?

Thanks,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       address@hidden