Bitcoin Forum

Bitcoin => Bitcoin Technical Support => Topic started by: fromheten on March 26, 2013, 01:48:17 PM



Title: "wallet.dat corrupt, salvage failed" after update of Bitcoin-QT
Post by: fromheten on March 26, 2013, 01:48:17 PM
Updated to Bitcoin-QT 0.8.1beta. When loading the program I get the error "wallet.dat corrupt, salvage failed". Where do you start troubleshooting? I have tried recovering from a backup (`scp me@server:path/to/my/backup/of/wallet.dat ~/Library/Application\ Support/Bitcoin`), but still get the error. I've removed everything in ~/Library/Application Support/Bitcoin except for the wallet.dat (recovered from backup) and reran the client, to no help.

Extremely thankful for any help in troubleshooting this.


Title: Re: "wallet.dat corrupt, salvage failed" after update of Bitcoin-QT
Post by: jackjack on March 26, 2013, 02:56:04 PM
Try dumping your wallet with pywallet


Title: Re: "wallet.dat corrupt, salvage failed" after update of Bitcoin-QT
Post by: deepceleron on March 26, 2013, 03:02:40 PM
You can attempt recovery with the experimental build linked here by "PullTester" (Windows), it will keep on recovering when previous salvage attempts would fail:

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/2410

Backup your wallet before and after. Try to recover old backups of your wallet.


Title: Re: "wallet.dat corrupt, salvage failed" after update of Bitcoin-QT
Post by: FalconFour on May 09, 2013, 11:01:11 PM
You can attempt recovery with the experimental build linked here by "PullTester" (Windows), it will keep on recovering when previous salvage attempts would fail:

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/2410

Backup your wallet before and after. Try to recover old backups of your wallet.

The link to the binary there is now dead. Still lost trying to recover this wallet... it's just downright insane that Bitcoin doesn't use a standard, human-readable file format for the all-important wallet.dat file. >.<


Title: Re: "wallet.dat corrupt, salvage failed" after update of Bitcoin-QT
Post by: fromheten on May 28, 2013, 01:17:46 PM
You can attempt recovery with the experimental build linked here by "PullTester" (Windows), it will keep on recovering when previous salvage attempts would fail:

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/2410

Backup your wallet before and after. Try to recover old backups of your wallet.

The link to the binary there is now dead. Still lost trying to recover this wallet... it's just downright insane that Bitcoin doesn't use a standard, human-readable file format for the all-important wallet.dat file. >.<

Sure is ridiculous. This was quite a while ago, but I remember
* Backing up my ~/.bitcoin (~/Library/Application\ Support/Bitcoin on OSX)
* opening bitcoin-qt
* quitting it
* copy the wallet.dat from the backup to the new ~/.bitcoin
* Start bitcoin-qt again, let it download the block chain
* Moving my funds to Electrum