Bitcoin Forum

I am fairly new to wallets. I started playing with them in January on windows machines and over the last month began compiling on Kubuntu. I like Ubuntu / Kubuntu / Linux much better than windows and would prefer to do everything there, but that is another topic.

I have some private keys I purchased from someone. (I understand the potential issues with this regarding my funds being stolen, again, another topic)
These are not bitcoin wallets, they are altcoin, but from my searches I do not think it matters relative to my question.

The first private key I received would constantly give me error code 5 when I attempted to import it. importprivkey theactualkey | The "Dev" tells me I am typing in something wrong. I checked it at least a dozen times. After searching and trying a million things I found I had successfully imported the key, but had not given it a label. I did a listaccounts and could see it. Error 5 went away and I started getting error 4. I figured that one out pretty quick. The problem is I wasn't sure what I actually did to solve the error code 5.

I received a second private key for a different wallet and boom, same issue. Error code 5.
Dev again tells me I must be entering something incorrectly. I have checked it again and I am confident I am typing it in correctly.
I tried a new wallet.dat without the wallet being encrypted.
Then I tried encrypting the wallet, and unlocking it compeltely and then entering the importprivkey actualkey label

Google searches show a tremendous amount of methods for troubleshooting error code 5.
Is there a document or web location which shows the actual explanations from whoever setup these error codes and exactly what they mean?

One answer I found about error code 5  talks about the password needing to be in SHA256 format and using a python script to convert it, etc, but I want to know what you Pros think.

I appreciate your help

What wallet is this?  Bitcoin Core seems less likely since you are talking about "The Dev."  But could be Bitcoin Core and something. More details would be useful to know: what software, versions etc you are using.  ;-)

As I mentioned these are not Bitcoin wallets, but are alts built from bitcoin QT wallet source.
The error code 5 message should be a standard error from the QT base. Just like error 4.

You will probably want to ask in (or move this to) the alt-coin section that is appropriate for it then.

I couldn't tell if it was built from bitcoin QT source or not.  Are they built from 0.10.1?  What alt-coin? 

I was typing in the last letter of the key lowercase rather than uppercase.
I had given myself some kind of mental block and must have been rushing when I checked it.
I came back to post and own up to my fool self and maybe the next time someone like me reads about erro code 5 they will get someone else to check it for them :)

Thank You for the reply

My time spent was not a waste. I learned a lot about BIP38 and hashing the password I didn't know

Great! Glad you got it fixed!