Reverting VirtualBox Guest Additions 5.0.22 on Ubuntu 16.04

Earlier today I upgraded my installation of Virtualbox on Windows 10 from 5.0.20 to 5.0.22. This also came up with an update to the guest additions which I installed into my Ubuntu 16.04 guest machine.

After a reboot Ubuntu would no longer boot and instead would flicker as it tried to change the screen resolution inside the virtual machine. This is a known problem in VirtualBox (see: https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/15526).

I’ve managed to revert VirtualBox and the guest additions back to 5.0.20 using the following steps:

  1. On the host OS (in this case Windows 10) reinstall VirtualBox 5.0.20 over 5.0.22 – this was straight forward, I found the old installer in my downloads directory.
  2. Open VirtualBox and start the Ubuntu guest machine, immediately hold down the left shift key. This must be done before the purple splash screen.
  3. At the grub menu that loads select “Advanced Options for Ubuntu” and then select the second menu entry. This entry should contain the word “upstart”.
  4. Once Ubuntu has booted to a console, login.
  5. Switch to the currently installed VirtualBox guest additions install directory
    cd /opt/VBoxGuestAdditions-5.0.22/

    and try and run

    sudo ./uninstall

    I didn’t have much success with this.

  6. Insert the guest additions CD from VirtualBox’s top menu bar.
  7. Mount the CD Rom:
    sudo mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom
  8. Switch to the cdrom directory
    cd /cdrom
  9. Reinstall the old version of the guest additons
    sudo ./VBoxLinuxAdditions.run
  10. Reboot Ubuntu and everything “should” be fine.