I have a home-built desktop system: AMD Phenom II x2 550, running 32-bit Zorin OS 8 Ultimate. When I set it up, I had had Windows XP SP3. I attempted to dual-install Zorin with Windows but it wouldn't go. So I installed it over Windows, which wiped out my previous installation and reformatted my disk.

Previously, I had had RAID 0 (mirror) on two physical drives. One of the drives developed a bad boot sector and I had to disconnect it. Now I have one 500GB drive (of which the system sees 484.1GB).

It has two folders: boot and home. Apparently, the boot file is full and will accept no further software updates. The files in the boot folder are as follow:

Grub: 8 items--
fonts
i386-pc
locale
themes
gfxblacklist.txt
grub.cfg
grubenv
unicode.pf2

abi-3.11.0-17-generic
ibid.-19,20,22,23,24-generic
config-3.11.0-17-generic
ibid.-19,20,22,23,24-generic
initrd.img-3.11 etc.
memtest86+.bin
memtest86+_multiboot.bin
system.map-3.11 etc.
vmlinuz-3.11 etc.

How can I enlarge the size of my partition in order to permit a larger boot folder? Or, failing that, what can I safely send to the trash bin in order to free up space in "boot"?

If the drive only has a /home and /boot directory, then you're missing most of the system. Do you have the root filesystem on another drive? It's not possible to give any specific information with knowing the partition layout and the size of the partitions. Also, do you have a separate partition for boot or is it on the / partition?

Post the output of these commands: sudo parted -l
sudo fdisk -l(Lower Case Letter L in each command)

Also there is nothing like "C drive" in Linux. Drives are referred to as sda, sdb, sdc, etc and the partitions include a number such as sda1.

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From the information you give, I'm assuming that you have a /boot partition and a root (/) partition (that which you call home). You can change the partition sizes, BUT, don't try to make changes on mounted partitions unless you want to have to reinstall.

Download gparted livecd and burn it do cd. The gparted .iso you download is a filesystem (iso9660) and must be burned to disk (not copied to disk) in order for it to boot.

Your Zorin install disk may also function as a liveCD for the purpose of resizing your partitions.

In either case, when the cd is booted, start gparted. It will show you your current partitions in graphical mode. Assuming the /boot partition is the first (/dev/sda1) and the / (root) partition is second (/dev/sda2), you would move the left end of /dev/sda2 to the right to create free space between the two partitions, then move the right end of /dev/sda1 to the right to take up the free space. Then commit the changes. For a 500 meg disk, it'll take a while for gparted to finish.

This will not reformat either partition; just move the boundaries and resize the filesystem in each partition (if you are familiar with PartitionMagic in the windows world, gparted works the same way). Just be careful at every step to be sure that you don't select an option to format.

When gparted is done doing it's magic, you will have two resized partitions. There is seldon a need to have a /boot partition over 100 meg. You can probably get by with a /boot partition of 20 to 30 meg unless you intend to try more than one kernel build.

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Thank you, yancek and bigrigdriver, for your prompt responses. I will try out your suggestions when I have some time tomorrow. I'll let you know how it goes. Meanwhile, is there anything I should do as a precaution (such as back up my drive)? If I'm in a fix now, it's nothing compared to my whole system being fried. Been there; done that. I gave away the T-shirts because I didn't want to be reminded!

That will be irrelevant in a week since Zorin 8 (based on ubuntu 13.10) ends support this month.

It might save you a lot of work to incorporate upgrading to Zorin 9 while addressing this issue. Just a heads up in case you didn't know that because several zorin users have posted recently and had no idea of the imminent end of 8 support.

You can never have too many backups....
Incidentally, RAID0 is striping (no redundancy).
RAID1 = mirror
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels

"That will be irrelevant in a week since Zorin 8 (based on ubuntu 13.10) ends support this month."

Thanks for the heads up, jross! BTW, how do you "quote" in a little box?

I guess I figured it out.

Would it be dangerous in any way to simply ERASE some of the old files in /boot? I'm thinking about "abi-3.11.0-17-generic" through "abi-3.11.0-22-generic", leaving "abi-3.11.0-23-generic" and "abi-3.11.0-24-generic" intact. Does each iteration address certain files (e.g., ones stored during its "tenure") and not others? Or are the newest ones the only ones that I need?

If I could delete the "old" ones and just keep the "new" ones (and then install the new kernel as well), that alone would free up enough space on my drive to accommodate the updates that I have been unable to install for the past month or so.

I read a post int the Ubuntu forums last week about this and a moderator there recommended NOT to do that as it could cause problems. I don't remember the method suggested nor do I have it bookmarked so you could either start a new specific thread here with that question or give it a look on the Ubuntu forums.