ASUS EEE 701 GRUB problem

Hi all, I found an older ASUS EEE 701. The Ubuntu login on it was unknown and the person who used it on company travel left a while ago. I decided to put Debian 7.6.0 on it (BTW: FreeBSD 10 does not recognize the WLAN). I installed "standard" (text) and all seemed fine. Just grub refused to install. So I installed the grub packages manually (using the "live" USB stick) and run "grub install /dev/sda" in a chroot environment. All worked but it still does not boot. "grub-setup /dev/sda" seems to be working too.. I also used "grub-mkconfig" successfully. The Asus EEE 701 has a 8GB SSD drive. Is there something "special" about the Asus I should do? Workarounds? Thanks for ideas Peter