Protection of boot sector and embedded area

[James Courtier-Dutton]

Hi

Is there a setting for grub-install/grub-setup where, if set, will
never actually over write the boot sector and embedded area of my HD?
I don't mind grub.conf being written to, I just do not want the boot
up executables written to.
For example, if I have an Ubuntu install, and the grub package gets
upgraded, is there a way to stop the automatic update from attacking
the boot and embedded area of my HD?

Kind Regards

James