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Bitcoin => Bitcoin Technical Support => Topic started by: zombieslayer9099 on December 14, 2014, 02:38:38 PM



Title: I'm sick and tired of Bitcoin QT
Post by: zombieslayer9099 on December 14, 2014, 02:38:38 PM
Bitcoin QT failed 3 times while I was rebuilding the blockchain database.
Once at 94% it got one bad block 'block checksum mismatch', why can't it just delete that 1 block and redownload it? Yes it did this in the past! Why do I have to reindex the whole thing, that takes 18-30 hours? This happens nearly every time I restart the client.
If there's any way to fix this please tell me, I am losing my patience with QT. I have no problems with it on my other computer running Windows 8. I am running Mac OS X 10.10 right now.
I tried building from source and got this error:
configure: error: Could not find a version of the boost_system library!
Even though the boost::system library is available.
I am trying to switch wallet. But I can't, my BTC is in multisig address, and I don't know how to get it out.

I am going to try giving it its own storage, I have a spare SSHD with nothing on it. If this fails I'm going to get a SSD.

Yes I absolutely need to get this fixed to get my bitcoins out of this multi sig address in Armory.


Title: Re: I'm sick and tired of Bitcoin QT
Post by: hhanh00 on December 14, 2014, 03:07:31 PM
Bitcoin QT failed 3 times while I was rebuilding the blockchain database.
Once at 94% it got one bad block 'block checksum mismatch', why can't it just delete that 1 block and redownload it? Yes it did this in the past! Why do I have to reindex the whole thing, that takes 18-30 hours? This happens nearly every time I restart the client.
If there's any way to fix this please tell me, I am losing my patience with QT. I have no problems with it on my other computer running Windows 8. I am running Mac OS X 10.10 right now.
I tried building from source and got this error:
configure: error: Could not find a version of the boost_system library!
Even though the boost::system library is available.
I am trying to switch wallet. But I can't, my BTC is in multisig address, and I don't know how to get it out.

I am going to try giving it its own storage, I have a spare SSHD with nothing on it. If this fails I'm going to get a SSD.

Yes I absolutely need to get this fixed to get my bitcoins out of this multi sig address in Armory.

Could you use your other computer to get your coins out?


Title: Re: I'm sick and tired of Bitcoin QT
Post by: zombieslayer9099 on December 14, 2014, 03:45:28 PM
snip

Could you use your other computer to get your coins out?

I could, but Bitcoin QT isn't synchronized on the other computer either.

EDIT: Bitcoin QT on the mac is reindexing, at 26% at the time of writing, it goes very slow. It doesn't use much RAM or CPU. I haven't seen much disk activity coming from QT either, is there any way I can get it to use more resources to speed up sync?


Title: Re: I'm sick and tired of Bitcoin QT
Post by: gmaxwell on December 14, 2014, 07:22:54 PM
Unless you're using a seriously old version, if you're seeing errors like this you have a hardware problem causing corruption of your system state. You really shouldn't be using a system experiencing errors as a wallet, since if it glitches out while sending a transaction you could suffer unrecoverable losses.

It doesn't just cover up for conditions which can only be caused by faulty hardware for several reasons, one if that if a fault happens again later in a undetectable way it can cause you unrecoverable loss (as mentioned). Two is because checking that the computer did what it was supposed to do adds overhead and so there is only enough of that to tell if something is seriously wrong, not enough to tell exactly what. Three is that having enough data to recover would require more storage... the error you sound like you're seeing is a leveldb error in the chainstate database, not an error with a Bitcoin block. With the database corrupt it cant fix it by just downloading something again, it must rebuild it. And, forth and finally, recovering a single system from an impossible state--even where possible-- requires extra code which must be written and tested and could later cause bugs, these are real costs which are hard to justify for something should only happen on broken hardware (which is doomed no matter what the software does) so it isn't added lightly.

Sorry you're having problems, but as you note your other system doesn't have these issues.  A reindex should take only a few hours maximum (though if your disk is failing that can drastically increase the time.), here they take me under 2 hours though YMMV a bit due to system speed.


Title: Re: I'm sick and tired of Bitcoin QT
Post by: zombieslayer9099 on December 14, 2014, 09:30:21 PM
Unless you're using a seriously old version, if you're seeing errors like this you have a hardware problem causing corruption of your system state. You really shouldn't be using a system experiencing errors as a wallet, since if it glitches out while sending a transaction you could suffer unrecoverable losses.

It doesn't just cover up for conditions which can only be caused by faulty hardware for several reasons, one if that if a fault happens again later in a undetectable way it can cause you unrecoverable loss (as mentioned). Two is because checking that the computer did what it was supposed to do adds overhead and so there is only enough of that to tell if something is seriously wrong, not enough to tell exactly what. Three is that having enough data to recover would require more storage... the error you sound like you're seeing is a leveldb error in the chainstate database, not an error with a Bitcoin block. With the database corrupt it cant fix it by just downloading something again, it must rebuild it. And, forth and finally, recovering a single system from an impossible state--even where possible-- requires extra code which must be written and tested and could later cause bugs, these are real costs which are hard to justify for something should only happen on broken hardware (which is doomed no matter what the software does) so it isn't added lightly.

Sorry you're having problems, but as you note your other system doesn't have these issues.  A reindex should take only a few hours maximum (though if your disk is failing that can drastically increase the time.), here they take me under 2 hours though YMMV a bit due to system speed.

I just got a new SSHD, and like I said, if necessary I will give QT its own SSD to run on.