Suddenly and without notice, VirtualBox application doesn't start.
First, it just didn't do anything. Not even an error message. I looked in the system log (/var/log/system.log) and I found these two messages repeated every time I tried starting VirtualBox:
[0x0-0xbb0bb].org.virtualbox.app.VirtualBox[4224]: VirtualBox: supR3HardenedVerifyDir: Cannot trust the directory "/Applications/VirtualBox.app/Contents/
MacOS": group and/or other writable (st_mode=040777)
com.apple.launchd.peruser.501[237] ([0x0-0xbb0bb].org.virtualbox.app.VirtualBox[4224]): Exited with code: 1
I did some research and found similar problems, most of them indicating problems with permissions. So I found that in order to fix it, I should change the permissions as follows:
sudo chmod 755 /Applications/VirtualBox.app/Contents/MacOS
sudo chmod 755 /Applications/VirtualBox.app/Contents/MacOS/components
After that, when trying to start the application I get a pop-up window saying:
Effective UID is not root (euid=501 egid=20 uid=501 gid=20) (rc=-20)
Please try reinstalling VirtualBox.
I would like to avoid that suggestion, as I have many important VMs and I don't want to lose them.
Then, is there any way to fix this without reinstalling. I haven't found any other good info about this that could solve the problem.
If there was no other option than reinstalling, is there anyway to backup the VMs? Digging into VirtualBox directory I haven't found anything sounding like a VM package/file containing each VM.
Regards
Best Answer
All your VirtualBox VMs and the application's settings are not stored in the actual
.appfile. You can try reinstalling it by just running the installer again. This is also how you would update VirtualBox to a newer version.Your original VMs and settings are stored in
~/VirtualBox VMs,~/Library/VirtualBoxand~/Library/Preferences, respectively. You can of course make a backup of those if they are really important to you, and if you haven't yet it's really a good time to set up Time Machine.