OK.
So (under Windows 8) I installed Vagrant and then created a VM based on hashicorp/precise32.
The first thing I went to do on the new VM was to apt-get update and apt-get dist-upgrade.
Then – I was presented with an error message starting with:
‘The GRUB boot loader was previously installed to a disk that is no longer present, or whose unique identifier has changed for some reason. It is important to make sure that the installed GRUB core image stays in sync with GRUB modules and grub.cfg. Please check again to make sure that GRUB is written to the appropriate boot devices.’
At this point there were three options on where to install grub. I decided to only choose /dev/sda. This seems to have been a good response as after the packages installed I was able to reboot the machine with no problems.