[Fixed] Manjaro: error loading kernel modules

I just installed Manjaro on a Compaq laptop and everything worked fine… except for that strange error message at startup: "Error loading kernel modules." Here's how to fix it.

Detect the cause of the error

To gather evidence that allows us to discover the cause of the error, we must run systemctl status. In our case, like this:

sudo systemctl status systemd-modules-load.service

This command will return a detail of the error. To see more information, you can run:

journalctl -xn

There, I discovered that the error was that systemd was trying to load some modules related to Virtualbox, which I do not have installed.

Solution

For some reason, manjaro + kernel 3.8 comes configured in such a way that it tries to load the virtualbox modules. In my case, not having Virtualbox installed, this is absurd, hence the error.

To solve the problem, just open a terminal and type:

sudo nano /etc/modules-load.d/linux38-virtualbox-guest-modules.conf

The file has the following content:

vboxguest
vbox.sf
vboxvideo

You just have to comment the lines, adding a # at the beginning and save the changes.

A restart is required for it to take effect.