Bitcoin Forum

Hello everyone,

I know this is a bitcoin forum but I think that if you guys can't help me, no one else will be able to

7-8 years ago I mined some dogecoins with my GPU for fun as I saw a tutorial on the web. I mined few weeks until I made around 450k dogecoins, then I stopped and never touched it again. So time is flying and I formated my hard drive, used it some times, then changed it for a SSD. Then you know what is following : our dear Elon can't stop tweeting about this cryptocurrency and it pumped as I never thought it would.

So I have my one terabyte HDD and this is what I have tried (I am a big noob, I basically know nothing about python etc, so I followed tutorials)

- Running Recuva, expecting finding .dat files => nothing interesting was found

- Running Pywallet : I know it has been designed for Bitcoin wallets at the beginning but I've seen someone said it worked for other cryptocurrencies so I tried. => Nothing found, excepted a "recovered_wallet.dat" file that I suspect to be there even if there is no wallet on the drive because when I tried to extract the private key It found nothing.

- Running winhex, searching for the following hex pattern "3081D30201010420", that is supposed to precedes the private key => O hits

The file I am searching for is not encrypted. But I don't know what try next, maybe it is time to resign ? It is really gone for good ? Can't stop myself to think what I could do with that money, I wish I could go back in time to punch myself hard in the face when I formated that HDD without backup.

The first thing to do (which is at the same time the most important) is to make a (or several) backup(s).

You never want to work on the original drive. Only on 1:1 images.

So, if you didn't do this yet: Please stop using your drive. Clone it sector-wise and only work on those images.

Alright, I will do this right now.

Recuva is Windows software so are you trying to recover data from an NTFS drive?

I assume the drive is still healthy. If not, then send it to a data recovery service because it's possible that reading or writing any more to/from it will break the drive itself.

Given that you have used the drive many times after that (did you install Windows on it after each format or did you just use it as a data disk?) it is best if you let paid software recover files from the drive too. You can try downloading something like R-Studio (https://www.r-studio.com) and use it as you'd use Recuva.  In this case, you need to read https://www.r-studio.com/Data_Recovery_After_Reformat_NTFS.shtml . Do note that you only have to purchase R-Studio for saving the files it recovered if it found any.

Yes, the drive is NTFS. And yes still healthy. In the informations I found the more recent files are from 2015. So If I remember well, I formated it, réinstalled windows on it and changed it for the SSD right after, thats why i don't understand how I have so much pain to find that f***** wallet.dat file...
I will try the R-Studio software, I'll keep you updated.

Highly likely it's gone for good depending on how much you used the drive after formatting. If it was a fresh format and you never used the drive after and worked off a cloned image, you'd have better chances. You may be better off having someone that does digital forensics clone and see if they can recover. Someone that knows how to use tools like The Sleuth Kit will be able to recover it if it still exists. Autopsy is more user friendly if you want to try on your own: http://www.sleuthkit.org/autopsy/ This uses PhotoRec, which does support searching for .dat headers.

Most likely, this large amount with Dogecoin will not be returned and access to them will be lost forever. This is the peculiarity of cryptocurrency. These are codes, numbers and, unfortunately, they are often lost for various reasons. Those who say that cryptocurrency is very convenient and reliable to use do not take into account how many cryptocurrencies are lost every year due to our mistakes and imprudence.

If you are still having backup and you can recover your wallet but if you didn't have it and then you will not able to recover your wallet even you wanna tried that 100 times and that will give you no result consider the date already formatted from your HDD.
Even when you are using various software to recover it back and it will not help you a lot.

It's not impossible to recover all of your data especially when you didn't even backup your wallet. The recovery will only recover the wallet but it will not able to detect the wallet.dat or privkey that connected to his wallet. I think that will be useless. What if he was using windows?

Means you installed new OS or saved any files after formatting the hard drive? If yes then you can consider that 450K doge lost forever because once the data overwritten it is impossible to recover using any other ways.

If not then simply use the recovery data tool and importantly save the recovered data into a different storage not in the on which you are trying to recover data.