So bought my first Bitcoins the other day (27 & 28/11/13) on localcoins, then transferred them to a MultiBit wallet. No problems.
I decided to use a 'safer' wallet, therefore I moved the coins to a Bitcoin qt wallet. The last few days I've been waiting for the blockchain to sync..got to 97% then my comp crashed.
I reopened bitcoin qt, and now it's syncing from zero again...just as slowly.
What should I do? Is there a way to open a another wallet, get my coins there?
I sorted it out through Blockchain eventually and was able to move my BTCs somewhere else..phew..
Blockchain wouldn't let me import my qt wallet over Firefox but with Chrome, no probs. Then I had to import priv key (dunno why) aswell then bingo!
As long as you have your wallet.dat , that's where your coins are . Back it up and back it up again.
Start bitcoin-qt.exe from command line with -rescan command and see if that makes a difference.
Is bitcoin-qt not showing your balance as unconfirmed ?
Now that you've found the wallet.dat file you should indeed import it into blockchain.info and then, and this is very important, send the coins back to an address in your multibit wallet. Why? Because blockchain.info is convenient for casual use but is not safe for storing large amounts i.e don't make a habit of it. You should never have moved your coins from multibit in the first place.
Also backup your multibit wallet as well. You can find out the location of the wallet file in multibit window title bar.
If you are downloading the blockchain from scratch I strongly recommend using the bootstrap.dat file, which allows your computer to simply verify blocks and import them without needing to download for days or even weeks on end.
The main issue with downloading from the network is that your client will only download one block at a time. It starts with block #1 and will not try to download anything except for block #2 after block #1 is verified, and so on. As you can imagine, with network latency this can become a rather painful process, as you have endured.
The bootstrap.dat file is widely available on bittorrent, torrent files can be found here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/files/Bitcoin/blockchain/
Direct torrent link: http://sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/files/Bitcoin/blockchain/bootstrap.dat.torrent/download
Downloading the bootstrap.dat file is just as secure as downloading the blockchain from peers, but since all the data is already there, the only latency you suffer between blocks is going to your hard drive and finding the next block.
You simply need to place the bootstrap.dat in your %appdata%\Bitcoin folder, (on linux/unix in your .bitcoin folder) the file will be renamed bootstrap.dat.old when the data import is complete. Using this it took me only 4 hours to catch up with the network, as opposed to the 1-2 weeks it took me before reformatting on the same computer.
