Bitcoin Forum

what should i do.  my computer is fucked and wont even complete a restore to get mywallet back

I'm sorry to be the one to break this to you, but you lost them all. If you can't get that wallet.dat back, then that's the end of them.

try a recovery application like recuva. also make sure to install or save as little new stuff on the drive as possible. the more you write onto it, the higher the chance of your wallet being overwritten.

Sadly that's the case.  It is extremely important to backup your wallet.dat to an external source.  Even if you don't need it for a year, you can still plug in the old copy of the wallet to a new installation of bitcoin and once it catches up with the blockchain your coins will be right where you left them.

If you had a substantial amount of coins in your wallet, it might be worthwhile either looking into a data recovery software or paying a professional to see what they can recover from the disk.

What Waltibaba said. If you're particularly desperate you can try searching your disk for the BerkleyDB magic bytes or paying someone else to... though I'm not sure how well that would work.

remove the hard drive containing the bitcoin wallet

buy a new hard drive and install it

install os

install the original hard drive as a secondary hard drive

boot computer from new install and look for wallet on old hard drive

you might have to reclaim ownership privilages if you get access denied errors.

if that doesnt work try some of the free open source data recovery utilities around

Yep just make sure when install the os that your old HD is unhooked so you don't accidentally format over it

The first step in data recovery is to stop trying to recover it.

Grab a drive of larger size and clone the farked drive to it.  Then do all of your recovery efforts on that drive.

You stated you reformatted.  Did you actually reformat or did you get a windows error and try to do a recovery using the install DVD?

Either way, stop trying to recover on that drive, clone it, and put your efforts to recovering the clone.  If you continue to work on the original drive the possibility of recovering decreases greatly with each write operation.  Even something as simple as rebooting can overwrite the area the file was on with a log or paging file.

GRC's Spin Rite might help in getting the drive operational again. I'd slave it on another system.

Depending on the amount of BTC you had on that drive you may consider to get some professional data recovery company to have a look at it.

If  the drive is just inaccessible the wallet might still be there. If you formatted it all, then you could be out of luck unfortunately.

This IS the answer that your looking for. Do it, It works, If the HDD isnt failing and you've been owned by a virus(wich im 95% sure is the case) then just plug the HDD into another comp and pull off your bitcoin folder

if it works feel free to tip ;D

Wouldn't buying a usb stock and putting a linux on it, and running it do the same thing.  Save yourself a hard drive purchase.

1: turn computer off.
2: don't touch computer at all until you have your bitcoins back.
3: write down exact problem.
4: find smartest person you know with a portable computer to help you.
5: **tell smartest person with computer, your exact problem and everything you did trying to fix it.**
6: have smartest person you know with computer come over to help you.
7: if he says anything about doing another format, while at your computer, refer back to step 4 immediately, if not proceed.
8: give smartest person you know with computer, plenty of space, don't hover.
9: if that doesn't work, refer back to step 4.

your odds are great following these steps.

That is if you don't want to recover files...

The only right advice is:

- don't use the drive anymore
- recover it by using another PC (or fresh installation on another harddisk) where it is installed as a slave drive
 
If you can't do it yourself or you don't feel safe, ask a professional.

Or do this

How many BTC did you lose?  You should offer the drive for sale to someone willing to scavenge for the coins.

If you formatted the drive but didn't do it the "long" way, the coins are likely recoverable.

Incorrect. Spinrite will recover the data.

"SpinRite now brings its legendary data recovery and drive maintenance magic to the latest file systems, operating systems, and hard drives."

Check it out!

http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm

I just had an idea, make the bitcoin client create a backup snapshot of the wallet, regularly, and put it somewhere else, other than it's normal data directory.  People aren't all as computer literate as the geeks like me.  Backups are important, this must be stressed very loudly.  If the bitcoin app won't do backups, at least have it pop up a reminder when it runs that you should backup your wallet, and have a link to the help file for how to do it.  Just a splash screen, with the bitcoin logo, and a reminder to backup your wallet, and secure it.

Sorry dude, if you never backed up your wallet, and your computer is toast, it's as if you lost your Cash in a fire that burned your house down.  There is no getting it back.  Hey, maybe someone should provide a Bitcoin Insurance service, wow, what an idea!  You pay them, say, 1 BTC every month or something, and they guarantee your losses, should they occur.  Unfortunately this would open up an opportunity for fraud, hmmmm.... I dunno how to deal with that.  I sure wish someone would send me 40 bitcents to counteract the hung transactions on my client that absolutely will not be processed.  I'd pay into a Hung Transaction Insurance program, ha!

I just wondered if you ever got your wallet back?  I did the same thing, stupidly reformatting a few nights ago all over a windows setup I was sick of, got debian on there, and then remembered my btc wallet.  Had about 47 btc in it, which I'd got when they were around 17 bucks a piece...by my figuring, means I paid around 750 dollars for this linux OS.  Anyway, I"m making a clone, but I"ve no hope...looks pretty paved over to me...and I knew better, all that, and just wasn't paying attention, thought I'd made a backup of wallet.dat.  I think grandma used to say, 'act in haste, repent at leisure' or something like that...

Try using this:
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=25091.0

Even if you've formatted your drive, if you are running Windows, PC Inspected File Recovery (http://www.pcinspector.de/default.htm?language=1) will often be able to recover files... it's a bit buggy, but it generally does the job.

Yes I agree with this guy(or girl?) try file recovery it takes for everrr... to look trhough all the found file, but you never know you might find it :D

You should keep your Bitcoin folder located on  separate external harddrive, then they are less likely to be infected by a virus.

Now what about the idea of a paid service for storing everyone's BTCs in a cloud storage system. A kind of distributed electronic bank?

Hah, then you're back in the Capitalist world of making profit from insecurity. What would the fees be like for that?

Or is it possible we could get a free distributed BTC storage system going using the combined might of the bandwidth/storage power of all BTC clients?   ??? ??? ???

Ideas..ideas people!

If you are thinking about a distributed 'cloud storage' system... Tahoe-LAFS (http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs) may be what you are looking for.

But if you are storing information in a place such as that, which is not a part of the BTC world(!!) you are essentially leaving something like gold bars in a storage lockup system. Did you give me that link so I can go and get robbed  ??? ??? ???
Come on, this is not just the same as any other information stored in bytes that there is out there that can be reproduced to no effect!
Hey, what about just having your BTCs copied in there and then uploaded by someone else????
Hahahaha........  :D 

Of course you should encrypt a wallet you upload there, just like you would when you uploaded it to Dropbox or similar storage systems.

Just rename the file to 'Roller coaster tycoon 1: mac guide', maybe even change or remove the extension, encrypt it & upload to Dropbox.

If you have tons of coins or are just super-paranoid, make russian matroska-type shell container archives, each with their own 60-char passwords, each encrypted, requiring the previous pass to open the next archive which asks for another pass.

Then you can leave it even in your gmail account, memory stick, random upload service etc.

Download linuxcoin and


got me out of many sticky situations ;)

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

As I understand it PhotoRec can only recover file formats that it knows about, and the Bitcoin wallet.dat doesn't appear to be one of those yet. The tool I've written (http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=25091.0) (which someone linked to earlier) is probably the closest thing there is to a Bitcoin equivalent of PhotoRec, though it only recovers enough information to retrieve your bitcoins rather than the whole wallet file. For various reasons this is usually more reliable than recovering the whole thing, especially if your data is fragmented.

All the really powerful file recovery tools are specific to particular types of files these days, unfortunately.

You can try this:

1- Buy a bigger hard disk;

2- Install the new HD as first disk;

3- Install your broken HD (with your wallet within it);

4- Boot your computer with the Ubuntu Live CD on it;

5- configure the network;

6- run the command: sudo aptitude install gddrescue

6.1- Take a look at: info ddrescue -> Examples

7- check the HDs! run: cat /proc/partitions

   You should see two disks listed, the "sda" and "sdb", new disk and broken disk


8- COPY YOUR DATA FROM BAD DISK: run: ddrescue -n /dev/sdb /dev/sda logfile

 After this, you can verify your new disk:

9- run: partprobe

10- Look for your partitions, run: sudo parted -l /dev/sda

10.1- Or if you want GUI, run: sudo gparted

9.1- Look for /dev/sda in GParted and look for your restored partitions

 If you are able to see your partitions, you are ready to try to mount the file system within Ubuntu, try "nautilus"

Best!
Thiago

32 gigabyte USB memory sticks are great for regular backups. You can get them for $50.

If you had a lot of coins, the best answer here is to clone the drive onto a bigger drive and then recover off the clone.

spin rite is awesome but is useless in data recovery after a format.. it is good at data recovery from having your HD heads crash onto the platters.


I cant see you formatting with many coins, if it wasnt much I say take the loss.

I do wonder how many coins over the years will be lost, from people doing this to people who just try bitcoin and stop when they have less than 1 coin in their wallets

What happens with those lost BTCs. Since nobody has them they are nobody's property. Can they be recycled into the system? Lets say 10 000 BTC are lost till now. Where are they? Can they be generated again? Is there way to determine if BTC is lost or not?

Best Regards,
Alisa

There's no way for any cryptocurrency to know if your private-keys are deleted, since that is outside the network by design.

A different cryptocurrency could be designed where it goes back into the network if not spent for some time, but that's not how Bitcoin works. Theres no way to know if bitcoins are lost or just waiting to be spent. Its the same way with cash.

easy, get your wallet.dat from your encrypted backup.

I once did a similar recovery for a friend of mine. He reinstalled windows including a format and forgot to backup his wallet. Big panic from his side, he installed a lot of shitty tools trying to recover the file.

DONT DO THIS!

Shutdown your pc - no, dont use the "shutdown" in windows, just cut power off.

Get a linux recovery or live-cd and boot your pc from it. make sure it does not write anything to your disk!

Now you can start recovering.

I recommend mondo or scrounge-ntfs for ntfs. They are built-in into most live-cd's.

If everything fails there is still hope:
there is a specific structure inside the wallet.dat-file, for example it contains lots of "blockindex"-strings, your public addresses (you can still get them, for example from your pool, do you?) and some more.

i wrote a little tool that searches your whole harddisk for this structure and recovers all private keys it finds - even if there is no reference to the file in the file system, even if the file is partially overwritten - and generates a new wallet.dat file from it.

Write me if you need more help!

This.

Windows flushes a crapton of data to disc on shutdown.

Pulling private keys directly off the hard disk is fast enough that it might even be worth making it the *first* recovery method you try, unless there's other information in the wallet or elsewhere that you need to recover. Unless you've got a slow PC or a very fast disk, my (publicly available, linked to upthread) tool for doing it can scan your drive as quickly as it can read data from it. It does really need optimising a bit more though.

classy :)

Just use a service like http://www.bitprotection.info  ;D For a little price you get a lot of protection!

All the well meaning Technical Advice presented here is all well and good.. 
but it is *assuming the owner understands how to use it*

To someone who describes the problem with their computer as "Fucked and wont complete a restore", it seems a bit like you guys are offering proceedural advice on brain surgery techniques to someone who might well be uncomfortable holding a screwdriver.

First Question is.. How many BTC (roughly) are we talking about here ?   a few, 10 ? 100 ? More ?

Basically, what is your wallet worth to you ?

If its over $500, then you shouldn't be doing *anything* yourself except switching the machine off and taking it to an *expert* computer guru.   

And I dont mean the 18yo next door who knows what "Regedit" does either.   You want someone who is extremely familair with NTFS, FAT32 or HPFS (whatever your computer runs) File Systems, Is *experienced* in using a range of Data recovery programs, knows enough to do nothing until they have done an exact sector-by-sector mirror copy of the drive first, and the futz about with the copy, not the original.

Such Gurus are not thick on the ground.   I *am* such a Guru in this area and I have been doing data recovery occasionally (a few serious jobs a year) for people for 15+ years, and I would estimate that not 1 in 100 (possibly 1000) IT techies would be even vaguely qualified to attempt such a task.   Any mouse-surfer can run "Easy Recovery Pro", but understanding what its doing and how to maximize your chances is not a job for dilettantes.

If you're talking more than $5000 worth of Bitcoins, even I wouldn't go too far myself before I recommended you head to one of the Big Boys in Data Recovery  - The businesses that have their own clean rooms, a full time staff of techs who do nothing *but* data recovery all day, and a huge stock of spare hard drives that they can swap the platters out of your hard drives into..

But don't expect to get out of it for less than $1500.. possibly up to $5000 depending on just what has happened.   If you've already tried recovering backups onto the drive, or reformatted it, or run any of the consumer-grade data recovery options, then your chances are not good, but they are still possible.   Ive had clients recovery from some amazing disasters, but its not cheap.

So, If its not too late, how about letting us know just how big a pile of bits you're talking about here, before you go diving into Fort Knox with the software equivalent of a chainsaw in the hands of a novice.

If its just a small quantity of coins you've lost, then by all means, wade on in, but if you dont know a partition table from an inode, I don't like your chances.

If you're around Melbourne, Australia (unlikely) and need some high level help, drop me a PM and we can talk.. Otherwise, find your local Computer Guru hang out or look up "Data Recovery Services" in your area.