BitcoinCore cant load wallet

Question

I have retrieved an old wallet.dat file from my harddrive that crashed about 5 years ago.

I have downloaded the new version of bitcoincore and downloaded the blockchain. I have then copied the wallet.dat file (which is in 96 kb) into the directory where the wallet should be.

But when i try to open the wallet.dat i get this sign: "Warning: Skipping -wallet path that doesn't exist. Failed to load database path'E:\bitcoin\wallet1.dat'. Path does not exist.

It says E because i had to download the blockchain on a separate hdd.

What could the issue be? I have tried to make new wallets and open them from the same directory and that has not been a problem. Can i somehow open the wallet to retrieve the private keys??

Answer 1

tldr: specify a directory not a file and have that folder contain a wallet.dat not a wallet1.dat.

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Your error message said

 Warning: Skipping -wallet path that doesn't exist. 
 Failed to load database path'E:\bitcoin\wallet1.dat'. Path does not exist.

However the help for the program says

-wallet=<path> Specify wallet path to load at startup. Can be used multiple times to load multiple wallets. Path is to a directory containing wallet data and log files. If the path is not absolute, it is interpreted relative to <walletdir>. This only loads existing wallets and does not create new ones. For backwards compatibility this also accepts names of existing top-level data files in <walletdir>.

(My emphasis).

An example configuration file says

# Specify where to find wallet, lockfile and logs. If not present, those files 
# will be created as new.
# wallet=</path/to/dir>

Your E:\bitcoin\wallet1.dat is a file not a directory

I can reproduce something similar by copying a valid wallet.dat to wallet1.data in a separate folder with no other Bitcoin files in it

C:> bitcoin-qt -wallet=c:\Users\ZZZ\Documents\wallet1.dat

So I think you could

• rename wallet1.dat to wallet.dat
• specify E:\bitcoin\ not E:\bitcoin\wallet1.dat.