VBox: Kernel driver not installed (rc=-1908)

[lads]

Well, here we are again. I am still using Ubuntu 14.04, and yet again the previous fix is not working:

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-generic build-essential dkms
sudo apt-get remove --purge virtualbox-dkms
sudo apt-get install virtualbox-dkms

After this this error message is still showing up. Any ideas?

[mcoyle]

UPDATE: Jump to the solution.

Hello everyone,

The following is from a Ubuntu 11.10 64-bit install, that has been running VBox without trouble for a month.

This morning as I tried to start a Win7 virtual machine (that I've used every day) I got a window with these messages:

VirtualBox - Error

Failed to open a session for the virtual machine Windows7.
The virtual machine 'Windows7' has terminated unexpectedly during startup with exit code 1.

Result Code: NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0x80004005)
Component: Machine
Interface: IMachine {5eaa9319-62fc-4b0a-843c-0cb1940f8a91}

And a second window with this:

VirtualBox - Error in suplibOsInit

Kernel driver not installed (rc=-1908)

Please install the virtualbox-dkms package and execute 'modprobe vboxdrv' as root.

For many people, the supplied solution of rebuilding the kernel modules works (virtualbox-dkms), but it didn't work for me and many others. I think I may have addition info to finally put this puppy to bed. This solution is based on the following: I initially installed 14.04 (Trusty) and upgraded to 14.10 (Utopic), but this problem is older than these versions and I think can happen anytime you perform an upgrade from one version to another causing the installed kernel to get out of sync with the installed headers.

First, use synapic to fully uninstall virtualbox.

For me, the problem seems to be that the kernel (3.13-43) didn't have matching headers installed (I had 3.16!). My solution was to use this page to hunt down the disto that contained the headers I needed. I then added the appropriate repository to my /etc/apt/sources.list. In my case it was 14.04, trusty tar:

deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu trusty-security main

Now you can use synaptic to install the missing headers, and then reinstall Virtualbox.

Virtualbox will now be able to build its modules since the correct kernel headers are installed.

Good luck!
Michael

[lads]

And here we are 3 and an half years later. On Ubuntu 14.04 it is already the fourth time VirtualBox stops functioning due to this issue. At this stage I am only aware of one solution, that may not work at the first try:

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-generic build-essential dkms
sudo apt-get remove --purge virtualbox-dkms
sudo reboot
sudo apt-get install virtualbox-dkms

[toby_1_kenobi]

In 15.04 I got the same problem, but it turned out it was the result of running a kernel that was older then the ones in the repository. I had upgraded from a previous distribution, but the kernel did not get upgraded (don't know why) so `uname -r` showed me I was running linux 3.16 and `apt-cache search linux-headers-` showed the repositories only held headers for linux 3.19. That was why virtualbox-dkms couldn't configure for the running kernel.

The solution was just to `sudo apt-get install linux-generic` and reboot. Virtualbox worked fine after that.