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