In this article, we will see how to fix colima error  " FATA[0004] error starting vm: error at starting: exit status 1"  which you may encounter during starting colima instance. It is a free and lightweight command line tool for MacOS and Linux based systems that provides docker container runtimes to locally run the workload with minimal setup required. Colima has been popularly used by many developers and programmers as an alternative to Docker desktop. Although it is very easy to use as compared to other docker runtimes available out there but occasionally we may get hit by error sometimes.

One of such error you can see is "FATA[0004] error starting vm: error at starting: exit status 1"  during startup of the instance if it did not stopped or deleted properly before due to whatever reasons. In my case, after installing colima through homebrew, I started VM instance and then using it to run my workload locally but after completion of my work I forgot to shutdown or delete properly and ended up terminating it.

Solved "colima start showing FATA[0004] error starting vm: error at starting: exit status 1"

Also Read: Solved "HPA and KEDA(ScaledObject) terminating manually scaled up pods in Kubernetes"

After termination of instance, when I tried to start it again using same colima start command, it was throwing below error on output and failed to start.

cyberithub@macos1066 % /opt/homebrew/opt/colima/bin/colima start -f
INFO[0000] starting colima
INFO[0000] runtime docker
INFO[0000] starting ...
> Using the existing instance "colima"
> Starting the instance "colima" with internal VM driver "vz"
> [hostagent] hostagent socket created at /Users/cyberithub/.colima/_lima/colima/ha.sock
> [hostagent] Starting VZ (hint: to watch the boot progress, see "/Users/cyberithub/.colima/_lima/colima/serial*.log")
> exiting, status={Running:false Degraded:false Exiting:true Errors:[] SSHLocalPort:0 CloudInitProgress:<nil>} (hint: see "/Users/cyberithub/.colima/_lima/colima/ha.stderr.log")
FATA[0004] error starting vm: error at 'starting': exit status 1

Above error usually occurs when the existing instance did not deleted or shutdown properly. In case you also face this kind of situation then to fix above error and to start instance, you have to first delete the instance and all its settings using colima delete command as shown below.

cyberithub@macos1066 % colima delete
are you sure you want to delete colima and all settings? [y/N] y
INFO[0003] deleting colima
INFO[0004] done

And then only you can again try to start vm instance by using colima start command.  You may notice that this time it will start without any error as shown below.

cyberithub@macos1066 % /opt/homebrew/opt/colima/bin/colima start -f
INFO[0000] starting colima
INFO[0000] runtime: docker
INFO[0002] creating and starting ...          context=vm
INFO[0021] provisioning ...                   context=docker
INFO[0023] starting ...                       context=docker
INFO[0025] done 
INFO[0025] keeping Colima in the foreground, press ctrl+c to exit...

And that's it. You can now continue with your work. You can also explore other colima commands such as colima stop to stop any running vm.

cyberithub@macos1066 % colima stop

To check current running status of colima, run colima status command as shown below.

cyberithub@macos1066 % colima status

Hope it helps !! Please let me know your feedback in comment box !!