Trying to import a private key into bitcoind

Question

I am in a special situation where I need to import my private key credentials and basically restore a wallet to bitcoind. bitcoind is running and I do have an rpc user/pass and server=1 in the bitcoind.conf, but no matter what I do, when I try and import the key I get the following error. There is no password nor encryption on the wallet.

root@coined:/home#  bitcoind importprivkey "5JxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxHjdCia9dt7" "root"
error: {"code":-4,"message":"Error adding key to wallet"}

Answer 1

Without anything in the log, it's difficult to day. But here are a few suggestions what could try to find out the cause of the error:

• Do you have write permission on the wallet.dat file in your .bitcoin directory?
• Is the wallet locked with a passphrase? Then you need to unlock it (would probably give another error message but worth asking).
• Did you set the disablewallet option either in command line or configuration file?
• Is your wallet possibly locked due to a -reindex operation?

Answer 2

leave away the "" around the key (and the label)?