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Which I think is about 3 years plus old but it was on my old computer which died. I have now recovered the drive at the bitcoin-qt application but it won't run on my current computer either due to the operating system or some other issue. The problem is that I don't have the wallet.dat files as I never generated that back on my old computer, so really need to run the old application in order to generate the file. Any suggestion on how to proceed? Is this an issue of finding an old version of the operating system and run the application file there or what other approaches should be taken?

Any help would be much appreciated

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  • when you start a bitcoin-qt app, it generates automatically a wallet.dat file. Usually you find it in finder, when pressing the option key and "go to", into the library folder. Look for a bitcoin directory. Alternatively it can be /Users/<your username>/.bitcoin. In terminal, do an "ls -la" and see if there is such a folder with a file "wallet.dat". You may want to provide more info on the way you "recovered" the drive, is it on a USB, can you see files? If you have recovered the files, there is no need to re-install OS X...
    – pebwindkraft
    Commented Dec 4, 2017 at 8:36

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I don't have the wallet.dat files as I never generated that back on my old computer

It's not clear to me what you mean by this. There is only one wallet.dat file (plus any backups for safety). It starts empty when Bitcoin QT (currently Bitcoin Core) first runs, and after that the wallet.dat file accumulates your Bitcoin transactions which determine its bitcoin balance. The transactions are stored in the blockchain, which Bitcoin QT initially downloads from peers on the internet and then subsequently updates whenever it is running.

It seems that you cannot boot from the old drive. Can you access it at all to see and possibly recover files from it?

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  • Ok this nows seems a little bit clearer to me... I actually have the wallet.dat file from my own computer, but I was originally under the understanding that I would have had to generate that on my previous computer, but after reading another post on here I actually found it. I have installed the bitcoin on my new computer and now just need to figure out how to get it to accept my old wallet.dat file?
    – martin vestergaard
    Commented Dec 4, 2017 at 6:58
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    On your new computer back up (copy) the new wallet.dat as a precaution. Then replace it with the old wallet.dat. To locate the new wallet.dat, in Finder, go to your startup disk and then open these folders: Users; [the folder with your user name]; Library; Application Support; Bitcoin.
    – brec
    Commented Dec 4, 2017 at 12:06

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