Bitcoin Forum

I've installed Ubuntu on another hard drive and installed bitcoin, but when I rebooted on windows my old bitcoin address has gone and so are all of my funds. This is the address http://blockexplorer.com/address/1MfHDFGvGEaMRcFeHJ3q6TRRwPYFHwaSMd (http://blockexplorer.com/address/1MfHDFGvGEaMRcFeHJ3q6TRRwPYFHwaSMd)

I hope you made a backup of your wallet. If you didn't and it's indeed gone, you will never get it back and there is nothing you can do about it. Search your computer for wallet.dat.

Simply restore the wallet.dat from the "another hard drive with Ubuntu". You should recover the bitcoins.

Hi,

Something strange happened to me. I thought that there are KEYPAIRS stored in the wallet.dat, but i was able to receive my btc without generating a receiving address. things i've done:

- installed bitcoin client on windows
- started mining for a while
- client automatically generated some new addresses

- backed up wallet

- Installed ubuntu and continued mining
- generated new btc address for new mining pool
- received funds on this address
- got troubles in ubuntu an reinstalled it. So i LOST my wallet
- SHIT

The only thing i could do is to restore my backup wallet and magic:
Bitcoin client "recovered" everything: my newly generated address and my funds from the new bitcoin pool.

How is this possible?

There are 100 keypairs PREGENERATED in the wallet. This helps to prevent Bitcoins lost just in a way you described.

thx hawkix 1btc for you
But I still don't understand how my wallet from windows disk ended up on the ubuntu disk

Thanks

Man "they" solved really every problem ;)

Your bitcoins aren't lost, the bitcoin network knows they were sent to your address, and your current balance. However, you need your wallet in order to spend them, so if you loose the wallet file, effectively your coins are gone to you. Have a look here (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Securing_your_wallet) for help in finding the correct wallet file that you had previously been using. Make a secure backup of it (on USB keys, encrypted passworded 7-zip on a secure storage site, etc) so it will never get lost even if someone breaks in to your house and steals everything computer they can see.

You should not use the same wallet on two installations at the same time, the wallet contains a list of one-time-use private keys used for signing your payments when you send, and one bitcoin may generate private keys in a wallet the other wallet doesn't know about.

After you have discovered the wallet file, decide on the one place you will use it and put it in that bitcoin's user directory. If it seems that you are still missing payments or balance and you know the wallet is the correct one with the addresses payments were sent to, go to a console window (or on windows, open a cmd window and go to the C:\program files\bitcoin directory), and run bitcoin -rescan, which will look through all the transaction blocks to discover any transactions for your addresses that were missed.

When you quickformat a disk, all that is done is removing the ability to access the files.  The files are still physically on the disk unless you take extreme measures to write random data over them, OR fill up your disk 100% with new information.  This is not completely unheard of, especially if you're using on a small percentage of your total storage space on the disk. 

The reason this was done was so that it didn't take just as long to delete a file as it did to copy it in the first place.