"Could not open moddep file '/lib/modules/3.XX-generic/modules.dep.bin'" when mounting using a loop

Running 14.04 in virtualbox 4.3.8

Unable to detect the guest additions.iso when i selected the guest additions.iso in the IDE Secondary Master.

No problem, so I used wget and downloaded the iso into the guest ubuntu headless.

when I attempt to load the iso from inside using these commands:

sudo mkdir /media/iso sudo modprobe loop sudo mount filename.iso /media/iso -t iso9660 -o loop 

At the sudo modprobe loop, I got the following error:

modprobe: ERROR: ../libkmod/libkmod.c:556 kmod_search_moddep() could not open moddep file '/lib/modules/3.13.0-24-generic/modules.dep.bin' 

Here are my lsb_release -a:

No LSB modules are available. Distributor ID: Ubuntu Description: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Release: 14.04 Codename: trusty 

EDIT:

When I typed

ls /lib/modules/*/modules.dep.bin 

I get back

/lib/modules/3.11.0-20-generic/modules.dep.bin /lib/modules/3.13.0-24-generic/mo‌​dules.dep.bin /lib/modules/3.5.0-49-generic/modules.dep.bin 

8 Answers

Thanks to Braiam comments, I have solved it using

sudo apt-get install --reinstall linux-image-3.13.0 

No need to reinstall linux image

sudo depmod 

works fine for me. credit goes to @pabouk

It may be system changes waiting for a reboot after updates. My installation was pointing to the wrong /lib/modules/<version>, but it worked itself out after a reboot.

#:/ $ sudo modinfo iptable_nat libkmod: ERROR ../libkmod/libkmod.c:557 kmod_search_moddep: could not open moddep file '/lib/modules/4.1.18+/modules.dep.bin' modinfo: ERROR: Module alias iptable_nat not found. 

 # apt-get install --reinstall linux-image-`uname -r` 

This will do the trick unless you want to upgrade your kernel.

In my case on a raspberry 3b+ running on the raspbian OS, trying to run a cryptsetup command which uses dm_mod in the kernel, which was not included in my kernel, this helped without needing a re-flash of the raspberry:

sudo apt-get install --reinstall --yes raspberrypi-bootloader raspberrypi-kernel sudo reboot 

Taken from this thread:

My cryptsetup command worked afterwards, while having the same error like OP stated: Cannot initialize device-mapper. Is dm_mod kernel module loaded? previously.

Oddly, I'm experiencing this issue if I specify an ExecStart stanze in a systemd unit containing two commands connected with &&, e.g.

ExecStart=/sbin/modprobe zfs && /usr/local/sbin/zpool import -d /dev data 

This might be incorrect, but then systemd would still need to fail with a helpful error message - like any program ever existing.

The command chain can be expressed with bash -c, e.g.

ExecStart=/bin/bash -c '/sbin/modprobe zfs && /usr/local/sbin/zpool import -d /dev data' 

(mind the simple quotes '' instead of double quotes "").

Ok. I couldn’t believe it but I got the same error and after much troubleshooting, I’ve discovered that the /boot was NOT mounted during this kernel module rebuild.

Once mounted, the problem went away for me.

Turns out that I was a good “victim” of a good security practice (as outlined by CISecurity).

If you can't access the network you can do

dpkg-reconfigure linux-image-$(uname -r) 

It worked for me