Comment 15 for bug 47135

I can confirm the behaviour Ryan experienced: I applied a normal update which included an update to grub (not sure whether via update manager or synaptic) and it overwrote the MBR. Updates shouldn't break the system.

Also like Mark Warriner I use BootitNG which embeds its own code in the MBR and also allows you to hide partitions from the currently running OS. So it may not be possible to detect whether there is another OS present, therefore this shouldn't be relied upon in order to decide whether to offer a choice to the user.

Mark's proposals are well argued and I support them.