Dropbox won't start anymore

Question

Since a while, 2 weeks, Dropbox does not startup anymore on my laptop running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS with GNOME shell.

When I run dropbox start -i in the console I get the following output.

  Starting Dropbox...Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/dropbox", line 1387, in <module>
    ret = main(sys.argv)
  File "/usr/bin/dropbox", line 1376, in main
    result = commands[argv[i]](argv[i+1:])
  File "/usr/bin/dropbox", line 1247, in start
    if not start_dropbox():
  File "/usr/bin/dropbox", line 731, in start_dropbox
    stderr=sys.stderr, stdout=f, close_fds=True)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/subprocess.py", line 679, in __init__
    errread, errwrite)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/subprocess.py", line 1249, in _execute_child
    raise child_exception
  OSError: [Errno 8] Exec format error

I already removed Dropbox and reinstalled it. What should I do to fix this?

Answer 1

I had a similar error, and this worked:

rm -rf $HOME/.dropbox-dist
dropbox start -i

After running those commands in the terminal, let the dropbox downloader run and install. It should work immediately after it finishes.

Answer 2

I had the same problem and found this fix

Basically, I fixed the error by reinstalling dropbox distribution with the following terminal commands:

sudo rm -rf /var/lib/dropbox/.dropbox-dist
dropbox start -i

Answer 3

Try to reinstall dropbox.

First open a terminal and type the following to remove dropbox:

sudo apt-get clean
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get --purge remove nautilus-dropbox
sudo apt-get --purge autoremove

Now type the next commands in sequence to install dropbox.

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 5044912E
sudo add-apt-repository "deb http://linux.dropbox.com/ubuntu $(lsb_release -sc) main"
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install nautilus-dropbox

Source

Answer 4

I had the same issue but none of this worked. But I found there was a running dropbox process. Even when I asked the status it showed as stopped and it didn't work at all.

My solution was to kill the dropbox process, remove the .dropbox-dist directory and run it again.

First find the dropbox process:

$ ps ax | grep dropbox
5490 ?        SNsl   0:01 /home/frankie/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86-2.10.52/dropbox
$ kill -TERM 5490

Then remove the dist dir and start it again

$ rm .dropbox/dropbox.pid
$ dropbox start -i

Hope this helps.

Answer 5

Uninstall and then follow the official instructions:

cd ~ && wget -O - "https://www.dropbox.com/download?plat=lnx.x86_64" | tar xzf -
~/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd &

Answer 6

The only way I could fix it (luckily everything was already synced) was by doing ... (Don't do this is you haven't backed things up or the files are not synced):

sudo apt-get remove --purge dropbox # (for me this was actually sudo pacman -Rncs dropbox because I am on arch ... basically, you just need to remove it)

find / -name "\*ropbox\*" 2>/dev/null

Remove everything associated with the dropbox (including $HOME/.dropbox-dist, $HOME/Dropbox (will wipe your data obviously, so back it up into a temp. directory or something!!), etc).

No clue why this stopped working, but doing rm -rf $HOME/.dropbox-dist unfortunately didn't work for me.

Hope this helps.