Bitcoin Forum

Hi there,

I did a format on my old pc back in 2012/13.

After scans with recurva i cant find anything called wallet.dat, idk witch wallet i have used.

Is there a way this wallet is not called wallet.dat and i need to check some other files?

Thanks.

You did a format in 2012/2013 and reinstalled an operating system and used that for a while, right?

If so, forget about it. Your wallet.dat is gone.

after reinstalling windows, the probability of getting a wallet is extremely small
but there is a big believer to get the keys themselves from the disk with a withered file

but there are conditions
the purse should not have been password-protected
and you after this did not install windows 10

Have you been using your old PC since?
There's always a chance if you didn't. Back then there wasn't many wallets so you can try to recover an Electrum, Multibit or Bitcoin Core wallet format.

Thats not true at all.
Windows uses how much? About 20-30 gb?

After reinstalling windows you have a 25/1000 (= 2,5%) chance of your file being overwritten (assuming 1 TB hard drive) => 97,5% chance it still exists.

Thats just a theoretical way of calculating the probability.
But files are most probable NOT lost after reinstalling windows.

The more you are using your PC the less probable it will get to retrieve an old (deleted) file.




5-6 years is quite a lot.
Did you use the hard drive frequently? Chances are pretty small you will find your wallet file after so much time.




You may have renamed it?
The file extension for wallet files from core/QT is .dat.

You might try to search for *.dat. This should give you all .dat files (not only those which are exactly named 'wallet.dat').

You can't calculate the probability of the file still being there.
It all depends on how full his disk was before he formatted, what filesystem was in use, what happend after he reinstalled, etc...

If his disk was 90% full before he got into bitcoin, his wallet.dat file might be more at the end of the disk. Formatting the disk and reinstalling windows will mainly write to the beginning of the disk, leaving a good chance for the wallet.dat file to still be recoverable.

If he got into bitcoin early, when his disk was only 2,5% full, his wallet.dat file is probably more at the beginning of the disk and a reinstall might have overwritten all of it.

Updates to his wallet.dat file doesn't even necessary make a difference because of the way NTFS/FAT filesystems work.
Those filesystem reallocate a file to different sectors if they need more space but it can even be spread over multiple places on the disk. But if the wallet.dat file hasn't change much in size there's a good chance the file is lost forever after reinstalling windows.

But as I said there's no real way for calculating the probability.


You could try pywallet for scanning your disk from beginning to the end. If you need more help with that, feel free to contact me so I can help you through it step-by-step

Some of the oldest versions of bitcoin core named the wallet.dat file just "wallet" without the .dat part.

How old is/was your wallet?

In recovery scenarios the file name may be lost, but the actual data could still be around.
Search with a recovery software that doesn't rely on file names.

You'll probably have to use some data from a new wallet file and program a search program to scan your hard drive for matching patterns. How much of the hard drive was rewritten determines your chances. A 1TB with 50GB of files would give you favorable odds. :)

It would be more efficient to search for the files of certain edit or creation dates and thoroughly examine each of them.