CrunchBang Linux

I'm trying CrunchBang for the first time on an old machine (it's an old HP office-type machine: P4 2.8, 2GB memory, 40GB disk, etc - it has a floppy drive!!).  I've used version 11 Waldorf, basic 32 bit, downloaded yesterday (19th March).

The installation runs smoothly enough till it gets to installing grub, and then fails, saying it could not install grub on /target/ - I've tried it several times with no success, and also tried lilo as there is no other O/S on the machine, but it won't install either.

Perhaps I should add that it does give an error message on the preceding step that I didn't pay too much attention to as it seemed happy enough to continue: it was about configuring apt sources from the CD and I simply assumed I could do that manually once the system was running.  Doesn't look very relevant to me.

At the stage of partitioning the disk there is no option for choosing where to put grub, and there is only one hdd in the box, so I assume that's what the installer chose.  I've tried running a shell but I can't see where target is set, and I couldn't find grub-install either to try to run it manually.

I have installed Debian numerous times, and sometimes found its partitioning tool to be rather buggy (I once had to use a Mint CD to partition the hdd because the Debian installer absolutely refused to) and maybe the fact that it doesn't offer any options for where to put grub is a related issue.  I've also known Debian's installer to refuse to put grub on a usb stick, whereas Mint's installer did it quite happily.  There are a number of postings related to the grub installation issue on Debian forums, but they all seem to date from 2011/12 so I assume now solved.

As a last resort I tried installing Mint and it went ahead no problem.  The only difference was that I allowed Mint to choose its own partitioning scheme: it saved time and I don't plan to keep it.  I saw a post on Debian forum about this, though the poster seemed to have chosen a seriously tiny boot partition and that was said to be the problem.  I've gone for a basic 3 primary partitions scheme with 15GB on / and 4 for swap space and the remainder on /home.

Is there some simple solution?  It's not great but I'm happy to install without grub and then install it from the live CD if that works.

Thanks!