Installer detected running Virtual Machines but there are none

[Daniel Serodio]

I’m trying to update from 4.3.0 to 4.3.2, but I when I try to run the installer, it says:

The installer has detected running Virtual Machines. Please shutdown all running VirtualBox machines and then restart the installation.

There are no VMs running, as can be seen both from the VirtualBox GUI and running VBoxManage list runningvms.

I'm running OS X 10.9 and this installation has been upgraded from 4.2.x to 4.3.0 so maybe there are some leftover files.

[Klaus Espenlaub]

Might be confusing wording, because the installer actually checks if VBoxSVC (the VirtualBox API service process) is gone. The GUI and the VM processes are the usual suspects which use the API, but there are others, like the VBoxNetDHCP process for host-only networking if you use that. Some people use the webservice (don't think many OSX users ever touch that though), and that'd cause the same issue.

Check if any process names starting with VirtualBox or VBox are still lurking around, and report those here. You're possibly running into some genuine bug where something isn't terminated when it should.

[Frank Mehnert]

Most likely a duplicate of #12241 or #12264. VBoxNetDHCP didn't automatically terminate in VBox 4.3.x and prevented VBoxSVC from terminating. This will be fixed in the next 4.3.x maintenance release.

[Daniel Serodio]

The following VirtualBox processes are running:

• VBoxNetDHCP
• VBoxSVC
• VBoxXPCOMIPCD

I'm now trying to update from 4.3.0 to 4.3.4 (was 4.3.2 when I opened the ticket) and still seeing this error.

[Frank Mehnert]

Moment, can you please double-check. Kill the running VBox instances. After you installed VBox 4.3.4, please reboot your host to be 100% sure that no VBox instance is running.

The fix was in VBox 4.3.4 so if you upgrade from 4.3.0 to 4.3.4 or from 4.3.2 to 4.3.4 you will still see the problem as the instances of the previous VBox release are still active.

[Anthony Green]

Seeing this issue with 4.3.28

[damnhandy]

+1 I am seeing this when upgrading from 4.3.28 to 4.3.30. The processes that are running are

mbp:~ me$ ps aux | grep VB
me             1135   0.2  0.0  2451240   7088   ??  S     7:10AM   0:00.05 /Applications/VirtualBox.app/Contents/MacOS/VBoxXPCOMIPCD
me             1137   0.2  0.1  2532164  11260   ??  S     7:10AM   0:00.13 /Applications/VirtualBox.app/Contents/MacOS/VBoxSVC --auto-shutdown

I can install only if I kill -9 the processes.