restore wallet using hd seed before 0.17.0

Question

Hd wallets are supported from v0.13.0.

Currently it is easy to save hd seed and restore a wallet from it (due to changes in v0.17.0 and v0.18.0):

1. dumpwallet (read hdseed from it)

2. createwallet (blank wallet)

3. sethdseed (set hdseed on a blank wallet)

How to do this using v0.16.3?

Problems I encountered:

• I cannot find hdseed in dumped wallet file, so I don't know hd seed to backup
• creating new wallets is done by starting bitcoind and passing -wallet option, but I don't see a way to specify hd seed when creating a new wallet

Is that even possible without upgrading?

Answer 1

I cannot find hdseed in dumped wallet file, so I don't know hd seed to backup

It used to be called hdmaster rather than hdseed.

• creating new wallets is done by starting bitcoind and passing -wallet option, but I don't see a way to specify hd seed when creating a new wallet

Is that even possible without upgrading?

No. sethdseed was added in 0.17. Before that, there was no way to restore a seed to a new wallet in Core.