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IainCunningham
Asked: 2014-01-08 00:22:14 +0800 CST

Error removing initramfs tools (fresh install)

  • 772

I have seen a few other people with this issue, but they have an existing install that they can drop into to fix it. I don't!

So, I am trying to install Xubuntu 13.10 using a live USB, and in doing so I have intentionally formatted the installation partitions (all my data is safely floating in the sky). Everything seems to work until right at the very end I get the message:

Error removing initramfs-tools:
subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1

The only thing I can think of is that some partition somewhere isn't big enough... I have:

sda1 /swap   512MB
sda2 /boot   56MB
sda3 /home   32GB
sda5 /var    4GB
sda6 /opt    4GB
sda7 /       31GB

Any advice at all would be welcome as at the moment I have a totally unbootable system following the attempted install. Booting to GUI hangs at the splash screen. Trying Ctrl + Alt + F1 from there does NOT give a login prompt. Booting into recovery and dropping to root shell leaves me with no partition other than sda7 and sda5 mounted, all the other partitions refuse to mount!

If I attempt to mount, for example sda2 then:

# mount -t ext4 /dev/sda2 /boot
mount: /dev/sda2 already mounted or /boot busy

Edit: Now cross-posted to http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2198405

installation

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    In the end I 'solved' this by installing 12.04.3 LTS instead of 13.10. As part of this I also 'rejigged' my partitioning schema:

    sda1 /swap  swap 4GB
sda2 /boot  ext4 128MB
sda3 /var   ext4 8GB
sda5 /opt   ext4 4GB
sda6 /      ext4 16GB
sda7             16GB
sda8 /home  ext4 200GB

    sda7 is unformatted free space for test installations and is where I will eventually try installing 13.10.

    In any case, 12.04.3 LTS is installed and running quite happily.

    • 0

  2. Instead of dropping into a root shell please enter dpkg or fsck or grub options from the menu and wait till it finishes. This will automatically mount the file-systems. Also enable network before dropping into root shell. Otherwise you wont be able to download the package list or any packages:

    enter image description here

    Please try the following commands:

    sudo apt-get clean
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

    If you still end up with the same error, try:

    sudo dpkg --configure -a
sudo apt-get -f install
    • -1