Can't start a virtualbox VM

Question

I tried to start virtual box but I can't start my VM. I can create it but when I tried to start it, I got this error. This is the photo that I captured of the error message:

And yes, I have EFI secure boot enabled.

Possible duplicate of Virtualbox Kernel driver not installed — karel, Nov 01 '19 at 11:10
Possible duplicate of How to fix 'modprobe vboxdrv' error in virtualBox? — Jishan Shaikh, Nov 01 '19 at 11:58

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 01 '19 at 09:07

As the VirtualBox manual says,

In order to run other operating systems in virtual machines alongside your main operating system, Oracle VM VirtualBox needs to integrate very tightly into the system. To do this it installs a driver module called vboxdrv which does a lot of that work into the system kernel, which is the part of the operating system which controls your processor and physical hardware. Without this kernel module, you can still use the VirtualBox Manager to configure virtual machines, but they will not start.

So you need to install the vboxdrv driver, like the error message spells out, too. To do this, execute

modprobe vboxdrv

with root privileges. If you get errors, you might need to install some software that's necessary to build the kernel module, like the C compiler or some header files. You can find further information in the VirtualBox manual linked above.

In general, it's very often helpful to actually read the error messages ;) As in this example, they often spell out what's wrong ("The VirtualBox Linux kernel driver is either not loaded or not set up correctly."), sometimes even what you need to do ("Please reinstall virtualbox-dkms package and load the kernel module by...").

Also, please don't post error messages as images like screenshots. Those cannot be searched. So the next person who has this problem can't find this question by searching for, for example, "VERR_VM_DRIVER_NOT_INSTALLED". Please copy and paste the text into your question as actual text.

And finally, after I told you what you did wrong: Welcome to Ask Ubuntu ;)

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 01 '19 at 10:42

0

try

sudo apt-get install dkms
apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r)
sudo apt-get install virtualbox-dkms
sudo apt-get install build-essential module-assistant

reboot it and check out.

answered Nov 01 '19 at 10:42

vishal

121

This will most probably won't work out as expected. Are you running the same OS as question asker's? – Jishan Shaikh Nov 01 '19 at 11:59
1

but both are similar, i'm running a Debian based OS and he runs Ubuntu. It works fine – vishal Nov 01 '19 at 12:34

Can't start a virtualbox VM

2 Answers2