Bitcoin Forum

Remember back in the day when you could buy bitcoin on ebay,I used too and one guy actually mailed the Bitaddress paper to you,another guy I bought of of sent a .rar file containing the wallet.dat which needed a password to open which he sent in a second email,it worked and I had no problems.

Fast forward to 2020 and I found an old .rar file with a wallet.dat in it BUT the password for it is long gone,I don't know what is in it(balance) but am curious to find out,so I figured I would run a brute force program on it and see what happens as it should be a 6-7 character password,this is where my problem is.

I can't get this wallet.dat out of the .rar file,it's asks for the password,I can't brute force the .rar as it's not encrypted,I need to get the wallet.dat out so I run the brute force program on it,I tried 5 hours yesterday with no luck,I'm embarrassed to ask but how can I do this ?

what you are saying is contradictory.

If it is asking for a password, it is encrypted.  The rar file can be encrypted in a way to show the contents, if that is where your confusion is.  Bottom line, treat it like a lottery ticket:  brute force it on a computer u don't use and leave it....  maybe it will come up with the pwd within your lifetime.  There are ways of optimizing, maybe multi core brute force, or maybe some type of GPU compute brute force.  but those increases 2x-20x? are not that much compared to potential time it will take if the rar password is long.

If u want I could help you brute force that RAR file, for a share of the plunder, if u can get into the wallet.dat.

If I double click the .rar it opens up,1 file in it,a wallet.dat.

I ran the scan on the .rar to be sure,"no password needed" as the .rar is not encrypted.

So it's not letting my move the .dat out,it wants the password,I don't know,I opened it back in the day with the password that was provided,the password was like 7-9 long nothing complicated.I know I never spent these because I deleted my wallets once they were at 0,it should have 100 BTC in it cause thats what I bought every 2 weeks with my paycheck back then.

I know there's an answer somewhere out there in bitcointalk.

If it asks for a password it means the .rar file is encrypted just like what the akagi82 means.

It's hard to brute-force but if you believe that the file is not encrypted try to copy the RAR file to USB flash drive and then move them to another PC/laptop. Try to extract the RAR file on another PC/laptop and let's see if it's encrypted or not.


Also, I would like to know if you are using the same PC/laptop where your old wallet() is installed including the wallet.dat?
If yes maybe you can still find the wallet.dat under %appdata% even the wallet is uninstalled. Try to check the AppData folder and look for the folder of the wallet you used before then check if you can find a wallet.dat file.


Or try to brute force the RAR file using the JohnTheRipper I don't know if this will work but I heard it works on cracking encrypted RAR file.
You can find the video from here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkTgqW71r1U

If it genuinely is a 7 character or even an 8 or 9 character password (alpha numeric), then most powerful computers will be able to crack it within a few hours.

If your PC is particularly weak, then you could lease a powerful private server to run the script to crack it. You could also resort to a professional wallet cracking service, like Dave's Wallet Recovery services. But you'll need to pay a fraction of the fee and most dont work for low amounts.

If your password might also contain symbols or ASCII characters, then odds of cracking even a 7 character password drastically decrease.

Hi rexxarofmoknathal,I have actually spoken to him and I'll send the .dat to him once I can get it out of the .rar.

For everyone else reading this,THE .RAR IS NOT!!!!!!!!!!!!! ENCRYPTED  for the third time,not to be rude but come on.

this is your problem. there is just no reason for someone to send you the wallet file instead of sending you bitcoins in a transaction to your address. even worse, sending it in a .rar file!
in fact this has been a very common way of scamming people for many years. they take your money and send you garbage that you will never be able to open because there is nothing to open!

Yes, you can encrypt the individual files in a RAR archive without encrypting the entire archive. You need to extract the encrypted file (which may take some work) before trying brute force.

These might help (or not):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAR_(file_format)
https://www.rarlab.com/technote.htm
https://hackaday.com/2020/04/11/100k-to-crack-a-bitcoin-wallet/ (for inspiration)

Hi,this was the early days and on Ebay,and got some through the mail too,I agree it's not done anymore though.

Thanks I'll try those programs you said.

This means that the rar is password protected (i.e. encrypted) and only the list of files (the file and folder names) is not encrypted.

However, if others gave you that "wallet" it means that they too had access to the private keys, hence they can spend.
Most probably you've got scammed.

I don't know what method you are using to crack that RAR, but i would like to recommend Jhon The Ripper for this task, i will leave a nice tutorial about how to do it.

https://dfir.science/2014/07/how-to-cracking-zip-and-rar-protected.html

Another nice tool to generate possible passwords is Crunch, with some patience and this tools you should be able to access to that wallet file.