Comment 41 for bug 576724

@Takkat - I agree, let's change the help text... but let's get it done quickly: we are still seeing people affected by this on a daily basis.

And no, it's not just inexperienced users. I've seen long-term ubuntu users upgrading from 8.04 get hit by this. To be more precise it's users that don't need to know about where to install grub2 (maybe they've only ever used grub) and getting confused by the help text. Many figure out right away that that was where they went wrong, but by then, the damage is done.

Regarding long term changes, I notice if you run "grub-install /dev/sda1" you get an error and it tells you to use --force. I think a long term fix would (at the least) have an additional confirmation solely for partition installs with a dire warning (similar to requiring a --force, but obviously this it is not possible during an upgrade/new install).