Start vm failed after update virtualbox from 5.0.24 to 5.1

Question

vboxmanage startvm shows the following message:

VBoxManage: error: The virtual machine 'VM02' has terminated unexpectedly during startup with exit code 1 (0x1)
VBoxManage: error: Details: code NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0x80004005), component MachineWrap, interface IMachine

/var/log/syslog shows there's a version mismatch, but i don't know where is it:

kernel: [45470.001207] SUP_IOCTL_COOKIE: Version mismatch. Requested: 0x260000 Min: 0x260000 Current: 0x240000

headless -h shows this:

VBoxHeadless: Error -1912 in supR3HardenedMainInitRuntime!

VBoxHeadless: RTR3InitEx failed with rc=-1912

vm works fine after removing virtualbox 5.1 and reinstalled 5.0.24

Here's how I upgrade to 5.1.

sudo apt update
sudo apt autoremove virtualbox-5.0
sudo apt install virtualbox-5.1
sudo vboxmanage extpack install Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-5.1.0-108711.vbox-extpack --replace

Is there something wrong when I upgrade virtualbox?

What can I do to get it work on 5.1? OS is ubuntu 16.04 btw.

Answer 1

Had the same problem on Debian where I accidentally installed the Debian virtualbox-dkms package along with the Oracle version of virtualbox-5.1 which naturally were different versions.

Check via dpkg -l | grep virtualbox, if you have something like the following, you have the same situation.

ii  virtualbox-5.1  5.1.8-111374~Debian~jessie amd64 Oracle VM VirtualBox
ii  virtualbox-dkms 5.1.6-dfsg-2 all           x86   virtualization solution - kernel module sources for dkms

```

Fixed it by:

1. sudo rmmod vboxpci vboxnetadp vboxnetflt vboxdrv
2. sudo apt-get purge virtualbox-dkms
3. sudo /sbin/vboxconfig.