Bitcoin Forum

I had to reinstall the operating system on my computer. i redownload electrum and put in my seed and when its done connecting it shows nothing in my wallet. no bitcoins, no addresses, no nothing!! please help! what am i doing wrong?!?

Check the spelling. There are a lot of words in Electrum seeds that are close, like "through" "thorough" etc.

Also, make sure you are connected to the server.

Did you restore the wallet es described here:
https://electrum.org/tutorials.html#restoring-seed

Did you have a different gap size in the previous wallet?
Try to use a larger gap size for example 10.

Also take in mind that you can't restore any imported addresses from seed.

it should at least be showing addresses.  Please check the procedure you are using.

I've just encountered the same problem. Was using Electrum on an old Linux nettop to setup some hobby miners and, alas, it gave up the ghost. Setup Electrum on Mac and restored with the seed from the other system and it shows a zero balance and reported no transaction history. Addresses are there (though I have little way of telling if they're the same addresses...) and autoc-onnect seems to be working fine, I see the synchronization work periodically, but no balance. About .01 BTC lost so not a disaster, but certainly a confidence killer.

Why can't you tell if they're the same? Couldn't you look up some of the addresses in a block explorer to check if they have any transactions (that match up with what you remember)? If they don't have any transactions, it seems likely that you typed in the wrong seed.

Also, be sure to read the rest of this thread if you haven't already...

I will look for a block explorer to try. When entering the seed words, are they intended to be space separated or return separated?

Pretty sure the Python code will filter out whitespace of any kind so that so you could use either.

Still getting nowhere. Block explorer reports no transaction record. The seed may be off, but I am doubtful. I carefully printed it on paper in a notebook with the original setup. I'm wondering if the problem was that, after setting up the Electrum client to receive income from my miners through the EMC pool, I left it running for a long time without closing Electrum. Perhaps the transactions weren't being logged continuously? When the old nettop failed, Electrum may have never been shut down since first setup.

I would be happy to mail the drive from the old machine to Electrum's developers if they want to examine this further. It powers-up but I have no other hardware at hand right now that can talk to a 2.5" SATA. It has no particular value itself and it was a clean Linux install with no personal information on it other than what's in the Electrum files.

Try my stand alone python script (please do this in an offline safe machine)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=612143.0

If the wallet had a lot of use, make sure to set the number of
receiving and change addresses to a high amount and check each
one. 

This will give you all the addresses.  Check each one in blockchain.info.
If they all are blank and zero activity, the seed probably is off?