In my holidays, Oracle now have released a new version of Virtualbox - version 6. As I was running 5.2.22 on my laptop, I downloaded the newest version (6.0.4) and installed it on my machine. The VMs started like they have done before, but as I do need the guest additions (for shared folders, etc.) I needed to upgrade them also.
When you start a VM, the VirtualBox software automatically checks for the existence of an older guest additions version and asks you, if you want to download/update to the newest version. You should do so - but in my case, after the download and the initial installation was done, the Run failed.
I was logged into my VM as root and the VBox Guest Addition iso was mounted automatically. Then it asked me to start the installation:
As I trusted this, I just started the installation by pressing the "Run" button. But the installation started a new terminal session and then it was hanging after some seconds at "Removing installed version of VirtualBox Guest Additions".
This shouldn't happen as it normally a very quick task. I tried to restart the VM, but it still stopped at the removing part of the Guest Additions.
I don't know, why this happened, but I was able to solve it by opening a terminal window as root and starting "autorun.sh" manually:
Doing this, the old Guest Additions were removed in some seconds and the new guest addition kernel was installed afterwards successfully (building was done in some minutes).
After restarting the VM, I was able to use the shared folders again.
So, if you have a problem with the Guest Additions after upgrading your VirtualBox software, try to start the Guest Addition installation from inside a root terminal window instead of using the normal autorun feature (even if you are logged in as root).
Thanks. Perfect solution.
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