Salvaged possible wallet from corrupt HDD ... now what?

Question

In short,

• I bought a few BTC years ago when they were very cheap.
• I reformatted my HDD and reinstalled the OS.
• I have used PhotoRec and http://www.cyplo.net/2012/04/01/bitcoin-wallet-recovery-photorec/ to recover 3 .dat files. Searching only for the ''detection signature'' of a Bitcoin wallet.dat

And the confusing part (if reformatting a hard drive containing bitcoins was not confusing enough!) is that the recovered .dat files are 7GB , 13GB and 8 kb.

Obviously, trying to use the recovered wallet.dat with Bitcoin-qt failed.

Chances are that these .dat are not wallets but I though this would be worth a shot considering how massively more valuable BTC are compared to 3 years ago.

Anything I can do with these recovered files?

Thank you!

Answer 1

• Install Python 2.7 and download pywallet to your c:\ drive.
• Copy your corrupt wallet.dat file to c:\

• Open a Command Prompt and type:

  C:\>pywallet.py --dumpwallet --datadir c:\  --wallet=wallet.dat --recover --recov_device=c:\wallet.dat --recov_size=416Gio --recov_outputdir=c:\
  

  It should extract all the keys to a new wallet on c:\ Copy the new wallet.dat to the c:\users\USERNAME\Appdata\Roaming\Bitcoin folder

• rename it wallet.dat.

• Start up Bitcoin-QT with the --rescan switch. It should take a while, but eventually it will start up and your coins are back.

Answer 2

Checkout pywallet. Its a python script that may be able to help you out by recovering your private key. I've had similar issues with Multibit in the past. Is your wallet encrypted?

https://github.com/jackjack-jj/pywallet