Jeremy Davis
Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
Article printed from: https://blog.jermdavis.dev/posts/2015/more-windows-10-fun-installing-virtualbox

More Windows 10 Fun: Installing VirtualBox

Published 04 August 2015
Updated 26 June 2018
General Windows ~1 min. read

Having upgraded my computer to Windows 10, I found myself unable to install updates to VirtualBox. After downloading the 4.3.40 (build 101610) release, clicking the installer immediately gave the error:

Failed to create extraction path 'C:\Users\jeremy\AppData\Local\Temp\VirtualBox': VERR_ALREADY_EXISTS

					

Googling this message gave two themes: First was "you cannot upgrade the VirtualBox Guest Extensions while you have a VM in the ‘saved' state" (a common theme on the VirtualBox forums) and then separately some source code which raised the error when it couldn't create a temporary directory. But it didn't give me pointers to any useful fixes.

Having tried various approaches including trying to install VirtualBox 5 instead, uninstalling VirtualBox 4 before running the 4 and 5 installers, and Windows Compatibility settings, I finally hit upon this solution:

Open a command prompt, and change directory to the location where you have downloaded the VirtualBox installer. Then run:

VirtualBox-4.3.40-101610-Win.exe --path .\tmp --extract

					

(Use the correct .exe file name for the version you have downloaded)

This will extract the MSI installer files to a directory called "tmp". Then run the MSI from this folder.

Having done that, the installer completes OK.


Updated to add: In the comments, Chaomai pointed out another solution to this problem:

Thanks for the solution!

I got another way to fix it: Check C:\Users\jeremy\AppData\Local\Temp. There should be a text file, which name is exactly ‘VirtualBox'.

Delete it and the installer will perform installation correctly.

Having now had a chance to test it, I can confirm his approach works for me as well.

If you see the error below, his suggestion is to look in the current user's AppData/Temp folder. (which is accessible via the %TEMP% environment variable on most machines) Here you will find a file called VirtualBox with no extension:

VirtualBox File

Delete this file, and re-running the installer will succeed. Cheers Chaomai.

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