I don't remember doing anything out of the ordinary that day, but now my VMs have been unusable for over a month. I have tried all kinds of solutions offered online, but so far nothing has been able to restore the adapter. I realize this seems to be a rather common occurence, but after weeks of attempting to fix it I have no idea what else could work. Everything worked fine for years, without me changing anything.
Proposed solutions I have tried so far:
- Uninstalling, then running installer as admin
- Running VBox as admin, then add the host-only adapter through GUI
- Running "VBoxManage.exe hostonlyif create" in elevated command prompt
- Deactivating other network adapters before installation
- Searching for hidden network adapters
- Uninstalling other programs that could interfere with network adapters (e.g. VPN)
- Checking that HyperV is off
- Installing different versions of VirtualBox (6.1.18, 6.1.16, 6.0.4, 5.1.38, 5.0.40, 4.3.40, 4.3.36 and older)
- Installing with NDIS5 (w/ "-msiparams NETWORKTYPE=NDIS5")
- Updating Windows (Win10 Education 1909)
- Updating network drivers
- Cleaning driver caches
- Cleaning all kinds of caches (w/ Win10 & CCleaner)
- Cleaning up remnant registry entries after uninstall (w/ CCleaner)
- Removing old VirtualBox Preferences between installs (delete Users\Username\.VirtualBox)
- Deleting Oracle Certificates, then reinstall
- Deselecting "Host-Only Networking" during installation, then trying to add it afterwards (GUI and cmd)
- Installing in default location and main drive
- Installing the extension pack (haven't used it before)
- Turning antivirus off completely in any of these steps (Comodo)
- Disabling my internet connection during any of these steps
- Rebooting between any steps (also w/ complete shutdown)
The only thing I haven't tried yet is completely reinstalling Windows, which I obviously really want to avoid.
Here is the main error message when trying to create the adapter:
Code: Select all
Progress state: E_FAIL
VBoxManage.exe: error: Failed to create the host-only adapter
VBoxManage.exe: error: Querying NetCfgInstanceId failed (0x00000002)
VBoxManage.exe: error: Details: code E_FAIL (0x80004005), component HostNetworkInterfaceWrap, interface IHostNetworkInterface
VBoxManage.exe: error: Context: "enum RTEXITCODE __cdecl handleCreate(struct HandlerArg *)" at line 95 of file VBoxManageHostonly.cpp
Also a small curiosity, don't know if it helps:
The oldest VBox version I can get to run is 4.3.40. With older versions (for example 4.3.36) the adapter is installed, but stays in a disfunctional state with a yellow exclamation mark ("This device is not working properly because Windows cannot load the drivers required for this device. (Code 31)").
These older versions of VBox are not functional for me though (don't even load UI), so they're not usable.
After rebooting, the driver is renamed with an appended "#4" and is now shown as working properly (no "!"). When upgrading (or uninstall->install) to a newer version (4.3.40 and up) the old adapter (with "#4") gets ignored and it tries (and subsequently fails) to install a new one. I didn't manage to get newer versions to use this remnant adapter.
I know there is a multitude of help requests concerning malfunctioning host-only adapters, but I feel like I've tried every recommended solution that applies and I'm at my wit's end.