Comment 3 for bug 1292628

The code in grub-installer does the following:

# Try to avoid using (hd0) as a boot device name. Something which can be
# turned into a stable by-id name is better.
default_bootdev_os="$($chroot $ROOT grub-mkdevicemap --no-floppy -m - | head -n1
 | cut -f2)"
if [ "$default_bootdev_os" ]; then
        default_bootdev="$($chroot $ROOT readlink -f "$default_bootdev_os")"
else
        default_bootdev="(hd0)"
fi

So it would be useful to know the output of the intermediate commands in your environment.