After power hit, wallet won't load

Question

I downloaded Bitcoin core wallet a few days ago. It was all going well, it synced just to about 25 weeks ago or something. One day the power went down and it shutdown the computer.

When I started bitcoin core again it loaded up to "loading wallet" and is stuck there. Unfortunately I already send a few BTC's to the wallet. Since I could not access my wallet, I figured that my BTC's are lost but then I start reading about accessing my wallet using Bitcoind, however when I create the bitcoin.conf file with the

rpcuser=bitcoinrpc
rpcpassword=xxxxxxxxxxxx 

It wont recognize it and still give me the same error and crash as before I created the file.

I am currently running on Windows XP. So since I can't access my wallet, and since the manual way does not seem to work either, is there any other way to withdraw the coins from the wallet? If not can anyone help me with the bitcoind problem. Thanks a lot.

Answer 1

The levelDB gets corrupted if bitcoind stops abruptly, like during an outage.

I'm not that familiar with running bitcoin core on Windows, but this fixes the issue on Linux. It isn't the quickest or best solution, but if manually transferring wallet.dat isn't an option (and you can't dump the private key as another person suggested because bitcoind won't run) this may work for you:

Go into your bitcoin data folder and delete the 'blocks' and 'chainstate' directories and restart bitcoind. It will of course have to re-download the blockchain and re-index which will take a long time, maybe even a week, but it will eventually catch up and you can use bitcoin core again.

Answer 2

Run bitcoind and on the command-line use this command:

dumpprivkey <your bitcoin address here>

This will dump your private key which can then be imported to any number of other bitcoin wallets like Mycelium, Electrum, Armory, etc. You will be able to access your funds in the other bitcoin wallet software once this key is imported.

Answer 3

Bitcoin Core has a built-in RPC command to reload custom wallets, if custom wallets stop showing after node restart, disk full issue or moved wallet from another node.

Loads a wallet from a wallet file or directory.

bitcoin-cli loadwallet "wallet name"

Note that all wallet command-line options used when starting bitcoind will be applied to the new wallet (eg -zapwallettxes, upgradewallet, rescan, etc)

Note: inside double quotes mention wallet folder name for custom wallets or use wallet.dat file name

Loadwallet Reference