There are many users using dual boot with Windows and Linux. In this configuration installing grub in MBR unfortunately breaks at least some updates of Windows 8 (update fails). And installing grub in partition has all sort of known problems with blocklists.
What about allowing separate locations for boot block and core.img? I.e. something like grub-install --boot-block-location=/dev/sda1 --core-img-location=/dev/sda This has all advantages of embedding core.img while allowing leaving MBR alone. Actually we could assume default --core-img-location, meaning that for grub-install --boot-block-location=/dev/sda1 we assume that core.img has to be embedded in /dev/sda unless proved otherwise :) _______________________________________________ Grub-devel mailing list Grub-devel@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/grub-devel
