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I ran Docker applications locally in an environment of Windows 10 Home, Oracle Virtualbox, The extension pack, Docker toolbox and Minishift.

Restarting after a few months, I get all kinds of errors. When I re-run minishift, I get a bunch of "OK's" and finally I get this message:

Starting Minishift VM .... FAIL E0807 20:29:20.950373 672 start.go:428] Error starting the VM: Error getting the state for host: machine does not exist. Retrying.

The command is: $ minishift start --vm-driver=virtualbox --memory=3G

First, I start docker via the Docker Quickstart terminal. Because I can work with docker (and openshift) I know the environment is correct.

How can I get minishift run again?

Graham Dumpleton
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tm1701
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7 Answers7

15

Clean up using the following command: 

minishift delete --clear-cache

Restarting minishift will recreate all necessary stuff.

tm1701
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5

It is possible that Minishift config contains wrong data. Reasons can be many, one them, for example, is that the VM got deleted via VirtualBox GUI and thus the Minishift has data about VM which does not exist. During the startup Minishift then asks for the status of VM, but VirtualBox cannot provide any information about it as it does not exist. In cases like this my workflow is:

  1. Delete the VM (if there is any) using the hypervisor - for example VirtualBox GUI or KVM's virsh command,
  2. Delete the Minishift home directory, located at %userprofile%\.minishift in case of Windows or ~/.minishift for Unix systems,
  3. Try to start Minishift.

Please note that this is rather destructive way of getting over the problem and if you have valuable data on the VM then you might consider more gentle approaches.

Andreas Gajdosik
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4

I had the same issue. First clean up minishift cache:

minishift delete --clear-cache

Then launch minishift from its folder (do not use a path env). In my case:

d:\progs\minishift-1.34.2-windows-amd64\minishift start --vm-driver virtualbox
Elie Nehmé
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2

If you get stuck (minishift delete --clear-cache is not working) with the virtual switch applied, type the following to deactivate whatever is set in minishift config view

minishift config set save-start-flags false

Then continue what you started: e.g. minishift start --vm-driver virtualbox

feder
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2

I had the same problem. My ubuntu machine is running as a VM in windows 10 host. The below did not work because nested virtualization is by default not allowed in machines running as a guest.

minishift delete --clear-cache

After enabling virtualization engine in the vm settings, I was able to start minishift(after clearing cache ofcourse) VM settings - enable virtualization engine

Dharman
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Rob
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0

Try to start you virtual machine in you Hyper-V Administrator. My error was minishift reserve 4Gb of Memory and my system hasn't enought. Right click over your minishift virtual machine, configuration and get down the memory reserved.

Ricardo Sanz
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0

I came to this issue trying to run minishift against an existing VM

Worked with the first VM, deleted that then attempted with a new VM, kept getting this problem and was not able to start the cluster even though it worked first time.

Had to delete the entire ~/.minishift folder and then it started with no issues ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Jonathan Turnock
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