VirtualBox Error – RTR3InitEx Failed with rc=-1912

16.04virtualbox

I have installed VirtualBox Version 5.1.18 r114002 (Qt5.5.1) on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. To virtualize everything (Kali, Windows 10).

I encounter the following error:

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.
enter image description here

  • What causes this problem?
  • How can this problem be solved?

When i run dpkg --list virtualbox-* in terminal, I get:

 Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold  
 | Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend     
 |/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)  
 ||/ Name       Version      Architecture Description
 +++-==============-============-============-================================= 
 rc  virtualbox-5.0 5.0.32-11293 i386         Oracle VM VirtualBox 
 rc  virtualbox-5.1 5.1.18-11400 i386         Oracle VM VirtualBox  
 un virtualbox-gue <none>       <none>       (no description available)
 un virtualbox-gue <none>       <none>       (no description available)
 un virtualbox-ose <none>       <none>       (no description available)

Best Answer

Read This first!

Please note that this answer is intended to specifically solve the original poster's problem when typical solutions like running sudo /sbin/vboxconfig or removing virtualbox-dkms and installing dkms does not work.

Please first try these simple workarounds, these might help you right away.

It seems that your installation version of virtualbox is for 32-bit architecture while you are running 64-bit operation system which can be the cause of this problem.

My workaround would be to remove the installed version from PPA, and installing virtualbox from official repositories.

To remove virtualbox, run:

sudo apt autoremove --purge virtualbox*

After that make sure there is no other version installed on your system by:

dpkg -l 'virtualbox*' | grep ^i

You shouldn't get any output, also you can try to run virtualbox to make sure it's not installed.

Then remove all related PPAs from your sources.list and sources.list.d directory. ex:

mkdir ~/apt-tmp
sudo mv /etc/apt/sources.list.d/* ~/apt-tmp

Make sure there is nothing except official repositories sources in /etc/apt/sources.list.

And update your sources:

sudo apt update

Now we can search to see which versions are available to install:

apt-cache madison virtualbox | grep -iv sources

Which produces an output like this:

virtualbox | 5.0.32-dfsg-0ubuntu1.16.04.2 | http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu xenial-updates/multiverse amd64 Packages
virtualbox | 5.0.18-dfsg-2build1 | http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu xenial/multiverse amd64 Packages

Then I would install the last version mentioned in xenial-updates:

sudo apt install virtualbox=5.0.32-dfsg-0ubuntu1.16.04.2

Also sudo apt install virtualbox, would be fine, but I would go with the above command to make sure my desired version is going to be installed.

And after all, check that the correct version is installed.

From command line:

dpkg -l virtualbox* | grep ^i

ii  virtualbox                     5.0.32-dfsg-0ubuntu1.16.04.2 amd64        x86 virtualization solution - base binaries
ii  virtualbox-dkms                5.0.32-dfsg-0ubuntu1.16.04.2 all          x86 virtualization solution - kernel module sources for dkms
ii  virtualbox-qt                  5.0.32-dfsg-0ubuntu1.16.04.2 amd64        x86 virtualization solution - Qt based user interface

From GUI: to make sure correct version is running.

Help menu -> about virtualbox

Pay attention to green highlight

vbox

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