Comment 45 for bug 798414

I stumbled across this bug after purchasing a used Dell PowerEdge 2850 and installing Ubuntu 14.04 server. I've been building kernels for years and so I downloaded kernel 3.13.11 from ftp.kernel.org and built a new kernel and a new set of modules. But update-initramfs failed do to lack of space in /boot. I did install with lvm enabled, and the size of /boot that was created is 240 megs (240972 1K blocks.) This was fine until I built and installed new modules. So the way I fixed it was by moving the old initrd.img-3.13.0-24-generic to the / directory, and then creating a symlink. (I doubt that kernel will now boot, but it will depend how lvm handles the boot process, and I'm not very familiar with lvm yet.) Anyway, after moving the old initrd there was enough space in /boot for update-initramfs to finish successfully. Regrettably, it left me with only 198 blocks available in /boot. I am now investigating whether it is feasible to resize /boot or not. But suffice it to say that if the installation created a larger default /boot partition, many of these problems would not be reported. The new kernel is running fine, so at least I was able to recover the system.