Bitcoin Forum

The armory runs on top of the Bitcoin.org client right? Is there a way to import my wallet.dat file into the Armory client?

unfortunately your question is a duplicate of mine:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=145526.0

short answer: you can't

I wouldn't recommend doing this, even if you could (running the same wallet in both Bitcoin-Qt and another application at the same time), but there is so much demand, I will be making it possible with the new wallets coming up... soon?  Hopefully soon...

Therefore, even when you can import them, unless you switch over to Armory completely, I recommend you just create a new Armory wallet and send funds to it.  Especially because Armory wallets can be backed up with four-lines of data -- your Satoshi wallet will require one line of information for each address, and then you'll additionally have to backup the Armory wallet, anyway.

that's exactly what i'd be doing and why i want the functionality... so i can convert all my old wallets and just use armory exclusively

But if you import the Satoshi wallet.dat file, you still have the "dead weight" of all those keys in you Armory wallet, i.e. you miss the simple backups (since all the old keys need to be backed up separately, whereas all the Armory keys are backed up together, as they are generated from only two huge numbers).

So if you want the full power of Armory, you should not import your Satoshi wallet.  You should create a new one, and transferring the funds by sending them to an address in the new wallet.

in order to do that with really old wallet files, you'd have to first get a really old copy of the satoshi client up and running... will that even work after May 15?