How do I recover newly created bitcoin addresses from an older wallet.dat?

Question

I had a bitcoin wallet and several other coins' wallets on my laptop and did a backup for my wallets several months before the laptop died. Between that time, I had created several new bitcoin addresses. After running several disk recovery tools, and they all told me that the wallet.dat files on my crashed hard drive were unrecoverable.

When I run bitcoin cliet using the older wallet.dat files, my newer addresses don't show up and my balance is incorrect.

Is there any way to fully recover addresses that were create AFTER the most recent walled.dat backup was created? This can pose quite a problem since I have no access to the coins associated with the newly created addresses.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Unfortunately, this is not possible. One of the disadvantages of non-deterministic wallets is that when new keys are needed and the key pool is empty, they are generated randomly. If the new wallet is lost, there is no way to extract those keys from an older wallet.

Answer 2

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Deterministic_wallet (BIP0032)

The Bitcoin Client does have an implimentation for a deterministic wallet.

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/3250

laanwj commented on Nov 14, 2013

We already have the implementation (merged with #2829), we're just not using it yet.

BIP0032 is a standard, so in principle it should be inter-operable. HOWEVER it's very much discouraged to have the same keys in multiple wallets in different programs (bitcoin-qt copes with double spends very badly at the moment).

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/2829

Merged in mainline on 16th August, 2013.