[Solved] VirtualBox fails to start any guest

[peterdordal]

I've used VirtualBox almost every day, for years, currently on an Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS host. Today, VirtualBox failed to start. There was probably an automatic Ubuntu upgrade since the last time I started VirtualBox.

The error message is

Failed to open a session for the virtual machine win7.

The virtual machine 'win7' has terminated unexpectedly during startup with exit code 1 (0x1).

Result Code: NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0x80004005)
Component: MachineWrap
Interface: IMachine {b2547866-a0a1-4391-8b86-6952d82efaa0}

The same thing happens with non-Windows guests. Running vboxconfig does not help. I have not upgraded VirtualBox itself in weeks; there should be no version mismatch.

I have attached what I believe is the correct log file.

Any suggestions?

Peter Dordal

[mpack]

Please provide a VM log file. With the VM fully shut down, right click it in the GUI. Select "Show Log" and save "VBox.log" (ONLY) to a zip file. Attach the zip here.

[peterdordal]

The log is below.

[mpack]

RAM over-committed.

00:00:01.318356 Host RAM: 7862MB (7.6GB) total, 1041MB available
...
00:00:01.713902 RamSize <integer> = 0x0000000060000000 (1 610 612 736, 1 536 MB)
00:00:01.714460 VRamSize <integer> = 0x0000000002000000 (33 554 432, 32 MB)

You need to find out what host app is hogging all that RAM, and close it.

Once you've freed up host RAM I would give this guest more VRAM, at least double it (to 64MB).

[peterdordal]

There's plenty of RAM: about 700 MB "free" but 3.7 GB free in the disk cache, which is freed automatically if an application needs it (unless something is deeply broken in my kernel).
And, for what it's worth, even VMs assigned 192 MB do not start.

There's also this second error box:

RTR3InitEx failed with rc=-1912 (rc=-1912)

The VirtualBox kernel modules do not match this version of VirtualBox. The installation of VirtualBox was apparently not successful. Executing

'/sbin/vboxconfig'

may correct this. Make sure that you do not mix the OSE version and the PUEL version of VirtualBox.

where: supR3HardenedMainInitRuntime what: 4 VERR_VM_DRIVER_VERSION_MISMATCH (-1912) - The installed support driver doesn't match the version of the user

This is mysterious, since I've never installed the OSE version, and never had this problem in the past despite regular version upgrades.

Peter Dordal

[peterdordal]

Speaking of version conflicts, here's what dpkg --list says:

ii  unity-scope-virtualbox                        0.1+13.10.20130723-0ubuntu1                  all          VirtualBox scope for Unity
rc  virtualbox                                    5.0.14-dfsg-0ubuntu1.15.10.1                 amd64        x86 virtualization solution - base binaries
rc  virtualbox-5.0                                5.0.32-112930~Ubuntu~wily                    amd64        Oracle VM VirtualBox
ii  virtualbox-5.1                                5.1.28-117968~Ubuntu~xenial                  amd64        Oracle VM VirtualBox
ii  virtualbox-dkms                               5.0.40-dfsg-0ubuntu1.16.04.1                 all          x86 virtualization solution - kernel module sources for dkms
rc  virtualbox-qt                                 5.0.14-dfsg-0ubuntu1.15.10.1                 amd64        x86 virtualization solution - Qt based user interface

My understanding is that rc means removed, so those should be. What is unity-scope-virtualbox? Am I supposed to have that, and virtualbox-dkms?

My version 5.1.28 had been running just fine

Peter

[socratis]

You have a conflict somewhere in there with the official version and the OSE one or the Ubuntu one. So, purge/delete/clean everything VirtualBox related from your system. Then install only the official one, not from the store or anything like that (the repositories), but from the official website https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads

[Perryg]

Ubuntu and their software center ( crap ) will cause all kinds of issues. Open a terminal and use sudo apt-get purge virtualbox* && sudo apt-get purge unity-scope-virtualbox .
Then use sudo dpkg -i to install the right package.

The unity-scope-virtualbox should not interfere but I remove it anyway,

[peterdordal]

THAT DID IT! 8 - )

Specifically, removing unity-scope-virtualbox and virtualbox-dkmg and virtualbox-5.1, and then reinstalling only the latter from the downloaded Oracle .deb file, fixed things.

It remains a mystery what happened to cause the failure, but I am *very* glad it is fixed. The failure did occur right after a linux reboot, which completed some software installations. I have no idea what software installation caused the problem (or, technically, even if); maybe unity-scope-virtualbox was one of the things to get upgraded?

Anyway, a GIANT thank-you to all who suggested fixes!

Peter Dordal

[socratis]

Great, thanks for the feedback. Marking as [Solved].