VERR_FILE_NOT_FOUND

[th3siggy]

I have been using VirtualBox for quite some time. My issues started when i went from version 4.2 to 4.3. For reasons unknown to me the services failed to start at boot. I had to run /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup manually after every reboot. After that first upgrade from 4.2 to 4.3 the clipboard stop working and it never worked again. I keep getting this error when i open the GUI or i start a VM: failed to connect to the virtualbox kernel service rc=VERR_FILE_NOT_FOUND. I google it but can't find anything useful. I recently upgraded to 5.0.2 r102096 and the problem persists. my host is a Lenovo G500 (Intel® Core™ i5-3230M CPU @ 2.60GHz × 4 + 16GB RAM) running Ubuntu GNU/Linux 15.04
Any thoughts? any help is greatly appreciated.

[Perryg]

Normally this happens when you fail to remove the repo version before installing the version from virtualbox.org. I would think the same fix would apply if for some reason the install became corrupt and left something behind even if it were the official build that was upgraded. I always remove before installing no matter what and you should see if that takes care of your issue. Your guests will remain so that should not be a concern.

1) remove/purge the current install and reboot the host to make sure all kernel modules are removed.
2) install the version you want and see if it continues to work after a reboot.

[th3siggy]

First of all, thank you very much for your reply.

1) remove/purge the current install and reboot the host to make sure all kernel modules are removed.

Did that. It didn't work but also i couldn't get rid of every single reference to VirtualBox. even after apt-get remove virtualbox --purge and after several find commands and greps i could still see a message after rebooting stating that the VirtualBoxClient had failed to start.
Tried to find a list of files and/or things that the installer does but couldn't.

2) install the version you want and see if it continues to work after a reboot.

I did this anyways. Virtualbox works, i don't have to run '/etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup' every time y restart but i still get the same error message in both the VM and the host.
I want to give it a try to the complete uninstall idea but the thing is even thoug i manually erased a bunch of things virtualbox related after i did the apt-get remove i clearly couldn't completely destroy every reference to it.

[Perryg]

Yes it is hard when there is something that did not get removed properly. But that is the only way to fix it. Keep looking and trying because the only other way is to start over. Not too bad if you have a separate home partition.

[th3siggy]

So, just to make sure we provide some closure to this issue and just in case someone else has the same problem (although the lack of results from google make me suspect is not really a common issue... more like a PEBKAC issue).
After the first failed attemp to clen it all up and not really up for a complete reinstal of my host OS, I decided to install and remove all the versions i've used in this box for the last year and a half in reverse order (just cause is my laptop and this is America and i'm free to do what i want with it) so i re installed 5.0 and then remove it, then 4.3 and at last 4.2. no reference to virtualbox was found and the message stating that VirtualBoxClient failed to start was no longer showing after reboot.
then i re install version 5.0, all my VMs were there. i restarted my VM and upgraded the guest-utils and guest-x11 packages and not only the services are up and running and the errors are gone i've also managed to get the clipboard working.
So thanks for the help Perryg, hope this is useful for someone else.