Bitcoin Forum

So yesterday I purchased approximately $1000 of bitcoins. I booted up my laptop to get the BTC address from Electrum and then shut it back down again. About 30 minutes later I started the laptop again and tried to run Electrum but my wallet.dat was then corrupted...

This is an older wallet so I'm having a hard time finding the seed from it (I have also moved since then so it's even harder). I've looked on every external drive I have for wallet backups as well as searched both of my computers filesystems.

I tried dumping the keys with pywallet, bitcointools, and wallet-recover to no avail. At this point I'm not sure what else to do. Perhaps a hex editor? Any and all suggestions would be greatly appreciated at this point.

I'll give a reward to whoever aids me in this wallet's recovery.

Thanks in advance.

Don't know if this will help, but once I had a similar problem. Solved it by copying electrum.dat and importing it to multibit.

If the dat file is not encrypted, open it in notepad and look for "seed".
You should find a 32-digit hexadecimal string. Copy it, rename your dat file,
start electrum, and at the "new wallet" screen, choose to restore from seed.
When prompted, paste your 32-digit code to recover your wallet.

Opening wallet "/home/ace/pywallet/electrum.dat"...
Unable to load wallet "/home/ace/pywallet/electrum.dat" or backups. See help on "Wallet Backups" for more details.
The error was "com.google.bitcoin.store.UnreadableWalletException Could not read wallet".
... done.

I tried importing it to blockchain and armoury as well.


It is encrypted.

Do you know the password?  If so, there's something you can try. I will post instructions later today.

Yes, I know the password to the wallet

Version of Electrum?

Also FYI, Armory, MultiBit and Electrum each use their own wallet format and can't import wallets from each other, unfortunately (only addresses).

At the time of the corruption it was 1.9, since then I have updated to 1.9.2 to see if it would resolve any issues.

lol



i lost 4 or 5 wallet

in this summer 2013 year in practic

i understand you 100% situation

i rusian but i know what you feal  ::)


i cry

OK, try this. I can't guarantee it will work,
but it's definitely worth trying.

1/ start electrum and create a *new*, empty temporary wallet.
2/ encrypt it with the *same* password as your corrupted wallet.
3/ exit electrum
4/ open the corrupted wallet file in notepad.
5/ find and copy the encrypted 'seed' value to the clipboard.
   it should be a long text string ending with equal signs - something like: 'MVE+ARAQzc73hvafKTo1ZHT0CAajPw=='
6/ open the new wallet file in notepad.
7/ replace the 'seed' value there with the contents of the clipboard.
8/ save, exit notepad, and start electrum
9/ click the seed icon to (hopefully) retrieve your seed
10/ you're almost done. do NOT use this new wallet. delete it and create a new wallet by restoring your seed.
11/ let it synchronize, cross your fingers and you should have your coins again.

The only problem is, when I open up the corrupted wallet, it looks like this: http://puu.sh/5bwcx.png

This doesn't look good... Another thought: do you have Time Machine (or similar) functionality enabled in your OS? If so, you could try to restore a previous version of the wallet file. Otherwise you may want to contact ThomasV (lead developer of Electrum) and ask for help.

I don't have any automated backup software enabled. I am in contact with Animazing right now who helped on Electrum ( although I think he only helped with GUI :| ) but I think going to the lead dev would be a good suggestion.