Misleading behavior?

[Titus D. Winters]

This was an odd behavior that I found in grub-install when attempting to
update the grub installation on a Linux machine that had booted with the
root NFS'ed (admittedly an odd situation.)  Running grub-install on
/dev/hda fails, giving the error "Not a block device or file not found"
which is ridiculous since /dev/hda is certainly found and is also most
assuredly a block device.  Examining the info pages for grub I realize
that this has something to do with grub attempting to install the images
under the root directory (which it can't when the root is NFSed).  

So I realize that I need to give it an argument, perhaps a
--root-directory argument, but what do I tell it?  Would mounting
/dev/hda under /mnt/local and then running 

> grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/local /dev/hda 

work?  (I'd normally just try it, but I'm out of the lab for a while and
quite curious.)

Not at all sure if there is anything that can reasonably be done to make
the error for this be any more intelligent, but I thought I'd point it
out at least.

-Titus Winters