Comment 1 for bug 2045418

I had discussed this with juliank too to see if this could be fixed by updating the dependencies of grub2-common to include grub-pc-bin but this is not a path we wish to take.

It is expected that grub-install can't install targets you haven't installed. grub-pc is the only thing calling grub-install with the i386-pc target and if you want to run grub-install yourself for a specific target you have to make sure to install that target first.

As such the proposed solution is to apt-mark manual grub-pc-bin so it will not be autoremoved.