VirtualBox: Fix for "Cannot access the kernel driver"

I ran into this when trying to upgrade my VirtualBox from 4.2.6 to 4.3.6. It was a really frustrating one to fix. There are a few suggested fixes floating around such as:

  • Manually installing both VBoxUSBMon.inf and VBoxDrv.inf drivers (didn't work for me)
  • Uninstall and reinstall (wasn't possible because the uninstaller kept rolling back)
  • Removing the network interfaces manually before installing (they weren't there)
  • Install over it (installer for new version kept rolling back)
  • Removing the files from user and program file folders, then manually searching/replacing all instances of VirtualBox in the registry (this is brute forcing it and I don't want to resort to this)

None of them worked for me.

What I ended up doing was:

  • Grab an old copy of your Virtualbox installer (make sure it's the same version!) from the VirtualBox wiki
  • Run the installer
  • Select "Repair" (on the old version)
  • Reboot
  • (optional) Uninstall the old version
  • Install the new version

This time it should work!

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Simple, no?

Sources

 
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