I bought bitcoins about a year half ago and my hard drive broke and i managed to recover them using a recovery tool that found wallet.dat from a deleted wallet on another hard drive but its courrped and wont work at all. i tired something to do wtih python dbdump.py --wallet but it failed, is there anything i can do any help would be great.The wallet.dat is only 112kb i dont know if that matters.
3 Answers
You can attempt to launch the client via the command line and add the -salvagewallet option this attempts to recover and dump the private keys from the wallet.
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i tried Pywallet 2.1.7 and it just keeps getting errors does this mean the wallet.dat is no use?– seanCommented Nov 26, 2013 at 1:40
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I once had a similar problem on a Linux box that had a simple permission error (owned by root running as standard user) but barring something like that it may not be recoverable. I presume you have no other backup of the wallet?– Mark S.Commented Nov 26, 2013 at 1:44
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1i had many backups but that was 1.5 years ago but hopefully i find one of them or i get the old hard drive repaired some how fingers crossed.– seanCommented Nov 26, 2013 at 1:48
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Spinrite is worth checking out as far as hard drive recovery goes. Well worth the price especially if your coin can be recovered.– Mark S.Commented Nov 26, 2013 at 2:04
I wrote a guide to corrupt Bitcoin Wallet recovery. The first thing I would try is pywallet. It can dump the private keys from your wallet to a file even if Bitcoin Core fails to salvage it. You can then import them into a new wallet.
I recommend using the information given here. I once managed to use it to recover wallets that resisted all other salvage methods I tried. (Casascius mentions full drive scanning in this post, but that is not needed if you have the wallet file).
