Bitcoin Forum

I run ubuntu and when I turned my comp on today electrum wouldn't open, so I tried running electrum in the term and get this

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/bin/electrum", line 160, in <module>
    config = SimpleConfig(config_options)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/electrum/simple_config.py", line 37, in __init__
    self.read_wallet_config(self.path)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/electrum/simple_config.py", line 197, in read_wallet_config
    raise IOError("Cannot read wallet file.")
IOError: Cannot read wallet file.
 

and when I search for a electrum.dat on my comp there is none

This error does not mean that the wallet file is gone, but that the wallet file is corrupted.

by default, the wallet file is located in your .electrum directory:
/home/your_user_name/.electrum/

To access your coins, the easiest way is to restore your wallet from seed, using a different file ;
To do this, move the corrupted file to another location, or start electrum with "-w filename" argument, and restore it.

I would like to know why that file is corrupted; if you can figure out, please let me know.

By the way I just moved and am having trouble locating my seed

You are the only one responsible for your seed, we can't help you locate it.


If your wallet is damaged and you need to restore from seed do the following:

• Open a terminal
• Issue the command electrum -w ~/.electrum/new-wallet.dat
• Select "Restore"
• Enter your seed.

If the wallet is now working again close down electrum and move your new wallet to be the default wallet.

You can now boot Electrum without any flags again.

By the way the forum has an edit command. I recommend you use it, it increases readability.

If I have this correct your saying without my seed at this point there is nothing I can do?

if you have lost your seed, open the corrupted electrum.dat with an editor and see if there is a 'seed' variable in it.
if it is still there, your coins can be found.

if the seed is not encrypted, restore your wallet with it
if it is encrypted, you will need to decrypt it manually, but that's not difficult.

I tried opening with text editor and it doesn't seem to want to open. Is there maybe a better application for me to try and open it with?

Try installing and opening it with gedit.

(On debian or ubuntu apt-get install gedit most likely)


Just out of curiosity; did you lose your seed or did you not save it to begin with?

I wrote it down on a piece of paper which has been misplaced in the move big mistake on my part.When opening with gedit I get this message

There was a problem opening the file //.electrum/electrum.dat.
The file you opened has some invalid characters. If you continue editing this file you could corrupt this document.
You can also choose another character encoding and try again.

open it with emacs; it will open anything

Well emacs opened it but the output is nothing I am familiar with seems to just be random characters and symbols.
 I am assuming this means its to corrupt for me to recover the seed from?

the wallet file should be human readable.
if this is not the case, I guess something bad happened to your file.

it looks like the file you are opening is in binary format...
perhaps you overwrote the wallet file with somethging else?

A short piece of what the .dat file looks like in emacs


\347K\345^L\212c\270,^\\345\245\250\361^0\

So the file is to corrupt?

My Electrum wallet opened in Notepad++ looks like this (addresses redacted) :

You could try opening it in another program, but if you are not getting anything readable, the most likely case is that your wallet is corrupted or it was replaced with a different file. That's why you have to store your seed somewhere safe in case your wallet file becomes unusable.

You could try running a program like Recuva in case the file is still recoverable, but I don't think that's the case. :(

Have you scanned your computer for malware? That's the first thing I thought of when I read this thread.

I run ubuntu so I think the malware is unlikely but I guess possible. My home directory is encrypted so I have no idea how to use a program like r linux on encrypted files. Is it even possible?