Bitcoin Forum

I think I already know the sad answer...but...I had a bitcoin wallet on a PC and the HDD crashed.  If I cannot locate a backup file, are the bitcoins "lost" or is there some way to recover the coins?

Describe to me how the hd is acting. Does it spin? Does the os attempt to boot? Etc..

How much was lost?

What exactly do you mean by "the HDD crashed"?

If the HDD isn't booting, you can always try booting from a live CD and trying to find the file.

If it's actually dead, depending on how much money you had in your wallet, you could try a data recovery service.

I see what you mean by mounting/recovering using a utility.  I understand.  I just read the Bitcoin Wiki and saw some good information on what to do and how to protect/backup the wallet.

I didn't have many coins - I bought some just to see how the thing worked.  I bought ~100 coins.  I will search that HDD for the wallet.dat file and see if I can recover the file and then use the wiki instructions to import into a new wallet.

whatever you do.. do not write to the darn thing. pull it out and stop using it until you are ready to add it as a second HD to another
PC.

100 btc is a lot of money.

i recover hd data all the time and rarely do i fail. but sometimes it can be impossible for me or so time consuming that i only go the extra
mile for family or work.

100 BTC ~= $1000 USD. Are you sure you aren't adding too many zeros there?

Best of luck.

+1 to this advice  ;)

Then copy your wallet.dat file to a flash drive & put in a fire/water proof safe.I have 4 FD's put up with all my wallets on them in different locations (safes).

One is bound to survive a hurricane,breakin,or fire  ;)

Good luck bro  8)

You may try Spinrite. It's not magic but I've seen it work the odd miracle on a "dead" drive often enough that it's usually the first thing I try when faced with a non-booting drive.

It's $89, but the guy has a money-back guarantee that he honors without questions so if it doesn't work for you, you didn't lose anything. If it works and saves your 100 BTC, it'll be well worth the money.

Slightly off-topic:
I'm backing up my encrypted wallet on dropbox, but I don't really trust them with my money. Is an encrypted wallet (default encryption with password in Satoshi client) safe enough to put on Dropbox or should I really add another layer of encryption, like Truecrypt?

Wallet encryption usess AES-256 in CBC mode, which is safe, but remember that only the private keys are encrypted. Everything else, such as your balance, addresses, address book, transactions, etc. is completely unprotected, so you definitely want another layer of encryption if you're concerned about privacy. The default encryption is only designed to stop people from stealing your money, nothing else.

 - http://gary-rowe.com/agilestack/2012/08/17/how-to-recover-your-bitcoins-from-a-failed-hard-drive/
 - http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=25091.0

I would make sure that those safes are in really different places, meaning different buildings, and hopefully different watersheds.

Most fire safes are designed for paper.  There are some that are "media rated", but that means "magnetic media", meaning they'll keep the items inside below the Curie point of most magnetic storage (tapes and hard drives).  I certainly haven't ever seen any that are "Flash Memory"-rated, and I'm not sure if such a thing even exists.

Personally, I generated a bunch of keys offline, encrypted them, burned them to M*Disc DVDs and printed the addresses (on paper) so that I could send to them.  I think that if my home, my bank, and my office (40 miles away) all burn down, I'll have more pressing problems to deal with.