If you’re a Mac user like me, who uses VirtualBox to run guest / virtual Operating Systems within OS X, you will most likely encounter errors with VirtualBox under Mavericks, specifically if you upgrade to OS 10.9 from a pre-existing OS X install where VirtualBox was already installed.
These issues will include anything relating to “Kernel Extension” errors when launching the VirtualBox application or “Kernel Driver Not Installed” errors when launching a Virtual Machine.
If this happens:
1. (Re)Download and (re)install the latest version of VirtualBox for OS X.
2. (Re)Download (re)install the respective Extension Pack.
3. In a shell (Terminal), cd /Library/Extensions and sudo rm -rf VBox*.kext
4. Reboot
This should solve all of your issues. Step 3 above is important because it appears that those Kernel Extension files are for older versions of VirtualBox (pre-4.3) that are not cleaned up by a re-install of VirtualBox, and will cause issues with 4.3 (which is the latest version of VirtualBox at the time of this writing).
While you’re at it, you may as well reinstall the Guest Additions in your respective VMs after you fix your VirtualBox install.
Willi
Thank you so much, work perfect.
Make Virtualbox and Mavericks play nice together
[…] I love Virtualbox and have been using it for several years. I use it to experiment with new linux distros and learn more about linux. After updating to Mavericks, I had a few issues, so I uninstalled and re-installed Virtualbox. Things seemed to be working fine, problem solved, so I thought. When I rebooted my machine, Virtualbox was no longer working, so I reinstalled it, boom, it worked again. I just thought that something went wrong the frst time. I discovered that after a clean install, it would work fine, until you rebooted. I did some research and learned that there was an issue with the old kernel files not being removed and had to be done manually. The documentation I found seemed a bit complicated, so I kept searching and found a great solution from a blog by Jonathan Ocab. […]
Matt
Worked for me, thanks!
Peter
Thank you. Worked nicely for me.
belenibanezmarcos
Thanks, it worked for me :)