minikube: open .minikube\machines\minikube\config.json: The system cannot find the file specified.

By the way, it is the GitHub markdown that is taking out the folder slash in something like: C:\Users\ianro.minikube\config\config.json It does happen here too. The line here was taken from that block, near the top. You can see that the \ is missing there too, but it isn’t in my original in Powershell. So don’t consider that this is where the error is, it is a red herring. 😃

Hi, I was also facing the same issue and was not able to delete the .minikube folder manually as well. On deleting .minikube folder It deleted all the files but was not able to delete the machine folder under .minikube.

So I found a workaround of this issue:

1. First I did shut down the Virtual machine that I created in the Hyper-V Manager and then delete that machine so it deleted all the virtual machine under the machine folder.
2. And following that, I was successfully able to delete the .minikube folder manually.
3. Finally, I ran the initial command: minikube start --vm-driver hyperv --hyperv-virtual-switch=“<Virtual_Switch_name>” and it was successful.

Hopefully, it helps!

In my case. I am running minikube in windows using Hyper-V. I also stuck at this error and cannot create new cluster with same name as deleted (but minikube start <cluster_name> work because the <cluster_name> folder inside C:\Users\username\.minikube were not existed.)

And when I tried to remove the C:\Users\username\.minikube folder and its sub, the windows pop-up told me that Hyper-V is using some file and it cannot be remove. This made me noticed something, the files were locked by Hyper-V so minikube cannot delete it completely. So, it come to my solution to fix this.

1. Stop Hyper-V service.
2. remove C:\Users\username\.minikube and C:\Users\username\.kube
3. run minikube start --vm-driver hyperv --hyperv-virtual-network <hyperv-ext-net> --logtostderr again to start a new cluster

And now my minikube cluster is working properly.