I have an old wallet from 2013 with some BTC in it possibly. I have guesses for what the passphrase could be but not 100% sure on it. Everything I find online is to use pywallet but I unfortunately am a total scrub when it comes to python scripts. So really I am confused exactly what I need to do to obtain the btc out of this wallet. Do I need to extract the private keys from my corrupted wallet and import them into a new wallet? or can I simply merge the corrupted wallet with a new one and the merged wallet will read right? I know pywallet can do all these functions but have no idea myself on how to go about it. Thanks for any help.
2 Answers
Install Bitcoin Core and they can do all this work to import your old wallet.
Bitcoin Core's -salvagewallet try to recover a broken wallet database (wallet.dat file).
I wrote a guide to corrupt Bitcoin Wallet recovery. Yes, you should use 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.
Dump the wallet with pywallet to extract the private keys:
python pywallet.py –dumpwallet > wallet.text --passphrase= PASSPHRASE
Now find the address containing your Bitcoins and sweep the private key.
