Bitcoin Forum

I just found an old thumbdrive in my old curios/relics box with bitcoin-qt.exe 0.8.1.0 on it.  I know there is bitcoin on this drive, but when I click on bitcoin-qt.exe, it just spins and spins and spins, and never actually opens the wallet up. It does nothing at all. 

My friend told me to look for "the .dat files", but I don't see any files in the bitcoin-qt folder suffixed with ".dat". 

What form of magic is required to jar this wallet open so I can move the bitcoin to a better place?

How do you "know" there are coins on that drive if you don't even know about the wallet.dat file?
Did you back up the wallet to that drive or are you just being hopeful?

I "know" there are coins on the drive because I "put them on it". I can't remember how much is on it, but I remember I was pissed when I lost the drive during a move. One puts coins in a wallet by sending them to an address represented by a long string of numbers and letters; it has nothing to do with knowing what a "wallet.dat" file is.

 That's hilarious.  You came here asking for help and suddenly you're the smart-assed expert?
I'll tell you what, paste a listing of the drive contents into your next post and maybe somebody else can tell you whether or not you know how to back up long strings of numbers and letters to which you sent coins.  That's more help than I should even offer.

 

The wallet.dat file holds your private keys.

Private keys are what you need to access your coins.

It has everything to do with knowing what a wallet.dat file is... more importantly where it is.

Thank you, Holliday, for not being a dick.  Can you tell me in which folder I should be looking for the wallet.dat file? I'm pretty sure I opened them all and looked everywhere, maybe there's a stone I'm leaving unturned?  More importantly, do you know why I can't just open the bitcoin-qt wallet (why it just spins and spins without showing me the user interface and beginning to download the blockchain, like it always did before)? Here's what I'm looking at in the bitcoin folder to begin with (can't upload a screenshot here?):



daemon
src
bitcoin-qt.exe
COPYING.txt
readme.txt
uninstall.exe

The wallet file is in a completely different directly.

%appdata% in RUN

And go to Local / Bitcoin and should be there.


If you formatted your drive then its gone forever.

HA!  Excellence, I found the wallet.dat file thanks to you.  Now what do I do with it?
 Lol, if this results in bitcoin, I'll send you a tip!

First make a copy of your wallet.dat. Put it in a safe place.

The least technical method would probably be to install the latest version of Bitcoin Core. Before installing you could create a folder called "Bitcoin" in user>appdata>roaming (if running windows) and copy the wallet.dat file into that folder. Install Core, start it up, let it sync (may take a while depending on your resources) and see if you have a balance.

More technical methods involve pulling the private keys from the wallet.dat and importing them into a light/online client.

I just opened it in notepad, it's just a huge mess of symbols/letters/numbers/etc. Do I actually highlight/copy/paste that garbled mess somewhere? Or maybe drag it out of there onto my desktop?

haha i pm'd you full instructions to import to electrum easy way if your interested ;p

best of luck! ;)

Holliday, adaseb, and CjMapope, let's have some addresses.

xhomerx10, eat a bag of dicks.  Welcome to the marketplace.

^It's a rough trade.

 You are a class act.  Congratulations on finding your lost coin you smart-ass.
 

pm you ;) haha thx man ..

addy on my profile, against the rules to post here in threads addys ;;;p

Did you find this file on your hard drive or the USB drive? When you run bitcoin qt on a computer with no wallet it will create a new wallet for you. So if you found it on your hard drive after you ran the bitcoin qt program on the USB then it'll be a new empty wallet.