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My friend's electrum wasn't working so I installed the latest version and we took his vault electrum.dat out of cold storage and put it in the wallets directory on his linux system.  (There was a file called default_wallet in there that I'd never seen before - did they stop using electrum.dat files at some point?)

Anyway, ran Electrum, opened his electrum.dat as the active wallet and despite having a network connection, the wallet is showing as zero BTC and no transactions are showing.  I opened up the electrum.dat to make sure it was the right public keys and it was.

What am I missing?

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

you could just check his balance by putting in the public key (viewing only) btw. and i'm not sure why it's 0 balance, but it sounds as though you might have imported the wrong .dat file?

and i don't know when it happened, but electrum now titles it as wallet_default.dat .. so you are correct with that.

I  checked the public key in question via blockchain.info - the BTC are definitely in there.  I opened the electrum.dat in a text editor and the same public key is in the file.  So, it SHOULD work.  Unless new versions of electrum don't like their old electrum.dat file?  That seems unlikely.  I'd expect it to be legacy .dat compatible...

The electrum.dat is encrypted, but that should only matter if I'm trying to do something like extract the private keys, right?  I am not too familiar with electrum, but I recall last time just being able to plop the electrum.dat in the proper place and run the program and I'd have access to the wallet without need for a password.

Have you tried to connect to another server?

Tried a few - wasn't having much luck with them.  What are the good ones?

I am now trying the electrum.dat on a windows copy of electrum.  Prior to opening this electrum.dat, I used the default wallet to receive .01 BTC just to make sure the server was working, and it is.

However, as soon as I opened electrum.dat the program reads 0BTC in the wallet, which I know is not true.  WTF

I appreciate any assistance or expertise you can give.  Thanks!

Hrm, on further inspection, when I click the receive tab on electrum, it shows no addresses.  Perhaps newer versions of electrum do not like this old electrum.dat format?

FYI: I dug up an old version of electrum and it worked with that.

What a nightmare.  I will never recommend electrum to anyone ever again after this.  Why in the world would they have not made future releases compatible with old .dat files, is bewildering to me!   :o

Please report your problem in the Electrum topic...this must be fixed asap