Bitcoin Forum

Okay guys before you start flooding me with careless guy title, I need real solution on this.

As the title states, I’m completely startled when I was looking for my nano ledger. The long story short, we had some house shifting stuff going on and in between lost my little hardware wallet.

Obviously I had it stored in safe place (in cupboard) but somehow it’s vanished.

I can still see the ETH on the address so no one has access to it yet.

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So, I have the pass phrase (all 24 words) written on the card provided by the nano ledger. I also have password obviously.

But the real question is, whether this will help me recover my ETH?

I did research on the forum but found very old threads stating you can buy new hardware wallet and insert these phrase and it will seed the old data???

Is it true?

Or

Do we have new solution to this prob please?

The 24 words you have are called seed phrase or recovery phrase, not passphrase.
Passphrase is an extra word added to your seed phrase to protect your fund in the case those 24 words are stolen.



Yes, all your private keys are backup by your seed phrase (+ your passphrase if there's any).


Correct.


As already said, you can buy a new ledger and recover your fund using the seed phrase (+ passphrase)

The other solution is to enter your seed phrase into other wallets like myetherwallet (https://www.myetherwallet.com/).
Just note that entering your seed phrase on an online web wallet has its own risks.
Do it only if you are 100% sure that your device is safe, there is no malware and you are not on a fake website.

Also note that your fund is no longer safe and should be moved to a new wallet.

Then you are good. I advise you move your funds though, since if somebody has his hands on your hardware wallet, he can brute force it and access your money (it is a possibility).


Yes. The safest is to use a new Hardware wallet for this, it can be initialized with your seed. It can be done with (software) wallets too, (at least for BTC it can be done and I guess that there are smart enough wallets for ETH too) but it's less safe.

I can't tell though what's the best course of action. If it's just lost, maybe buying a new hardware wallet is best (although it may take time to arrive to you). If it's stolen or there's a high chance that it ended up on others' hands, I'd move the funds asap.

Okay so at least I have second and last chance to recover my money from the wallet.
I will do extensive research before using any software wallet and putting those phrase words.

I dont know, I think it is worth to get new ledger though I will loose purchase money but it is worth it so that is best possible option for me.

Thank guys, really appreciated your help. Just needed to be sure before buying the new hardware. 

You can recover in a new hardware wallet, but it doesn't need to be a new hardware wallet.

You can even insert your 24 words in metamask and recover your eth from there.

24 words seed is compatible with  basically every wallet out there. The problem in inserting your seed in a mobile/browser wallet is that you will increase your changes of getting hacked, as hot wallets are not as safe as a cold hardware wallet.

But if you just want to recover the coins and send them to an exchange and sell, it can be done in metamask. And you will save your money that you would spend in a new purchase

You are correct, but I just want to make this more clear. So far the seed phrase generated on Ledger Nano is BIP39 supported seed phrase, importing it on BIP39 wallet should be fine, it will regenerate back the keys and addresses and sychronized with the blockchains for the coins recovery.

Ok guys, the discussion continues!
Now after putting the 24 phrases into MEW software I am getting bunch of addresses to choose from.

The first option is about the chain, so I have selected the mew chain.
In the second option chose Ledger BUT, it is showing me bunch of addresses from which I need to select one as my wallet.

The thing is it is not showing me my address on which the funds are stored.

<----completely confused----->

Checkout the screenshot please . .

https://i.ibb.co/4s55y6q/Screenshot-2021-06-02-09-56-34.png

Key Questions:

Why not showing my address directly?

Why so many addresses?

How do I find my address?

choose  correct derivation path

Because this mew wallet have different derivation path than ledger and it can't detect address with balance automatically.
I think that Ledger Live uses derivation path  m/44'/60'/0'/0 and for Mew is probably different m/44'/60'/0'.
Since you entered your seed words to online wallet like this you just exposed them online so they are not safe anymore and don't import them in new hardware wallet ever again.

All wallets generate multiple addresses like this and they can be visible of hidden.

Find correct derivation path or temporary import seed words to new hardware wallet, than send coins to new address that is generated offline with new seed words.

This is completely true, but in the specific case of OP we can see that his hardware wallet contained only private keys from ETH (at least he did not state otherwise), and that it does not make much sense to buy a new hardware wallet to make a recovery - from which we can conclude (although it may not be true) that the value of that coin is probably small - and consequently the risk of loss is acceptable.

What should be emphasized in this case is that this seed is considered compromised and the OP should no longer use it if it buys a new hardware wallet at any time in the future.

After you change your derivation path, just check the first one or two addresses from the list. As far as I remember, Ledger uses the first one on the list (like my Nano S and Nano X), so there's no need to click next to find your address unless you explicitly use a different address when you use your Ledger.

Read the OP.

The question from OP was how to access his coins without access to his hardware wallet but with access to the mnemonic code and passphrases.

And the answer to this is.. to recover the wallet using this mnemonic code. Obviously you'll have to enter it into a software wallet if you don't want to buy another hardware wallet.

If you're not familiar with HD wallet key generation and key words like "derivation path", "gap limit" and such, I strongly suggest to always document safely the derivation path(s) of your coin(s) and accounts you use on a hardware and software wallet. It takes off some hassle when you need to recover a wallet.

Next thing I don't quite get is: when the original poster decided to have a hardware wallet then he'd likely needs a new one. Why shouldn't he?

If I were him, I'd buy a new Ledger, restore my wallet with the saved seed words and whatever secret he has in addition to it, if so. Check my funds, all should still be there (if not, pay attention to "gap limit" and maybe a constrained wallet scan due to a too small gap limit). You should now also be able to get the information about the proper derivation path of your Ledger wallet.

On a safe computer I'd then setup a known good and safe software wallet and restore therein the Ledger wallet with the seed words and correct derivation path. The software wallet should then show the same funds as in Ledger Live or Ledger hardware.

Next, I'd reset the Ledger hardware and generate a new wallet with new seed (and optional passphrase if you want to use that, but you should know what consequences this imposes). It is of great importance to properly document this new seed and why it has been newly created. Store it safely and with redundancy and if you used an additional optional seed passphrase, do NOT store this additional secret together with your seed. I'd recommend to store it separate from the seed as you should never loose it or your seed will render practically worthless.

Now transfer your funds from the software wallet fully to your new Ledger wallet and you're back and safe in business.

I'd highly recommend to think about it how and why your hardware wallet storage scheme did fail in the first place and you should make sure this doesn't happen again.

I found this on support.ledger.com:

• Ledger Live creates new ETH accounts in the path: m/44'/60'/0'/0 (it's no typo that the last element is not a "hardened" branch, 0 instead of 0'; the apostrophe ' chooses "hardened" addresses)
  
• Ledger Wallet Ethereum Chrome App uses the path: m/44'/60'/0'
  

A better option if you are not familiar with derivation paths is to simply not touch them. Often with hardware wallets' native software you have to go digging around in the options to find or change the derivation path, which just raises the risk of doing something non-standard if you don't know what you are doing. Just use the default options.

The only reason not to is if he needs access to his funds now, such as in the case he thinks his seed phrase has been stolen rather than simply lost and he needs to secure his funds in the meantime while waiting for a new hardware wallet to arrive.

I agree with the rest of your steps except this one, depending on what you mean by a "safe" computer. It should be airgapped and ran from a live OS. Just using your normal OS which you are pretty sure is free from malware is not nearly safe enough.

Yes already went through all the articles and support blogs. Thanks for the heads up.

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Currently I can see I am in big trouble right now.
I went through the HD derivation path m/44'/60'/0'/0  and also m/44'/60'/0'

On both of them, I have screened about 100 addresses but none of them shows my address yet.
I have also read that all the addresses remains same and stays in the same sequence.

So, slowly I will be screening further. Since it's tedious work to screen through so many addresses in single time, I will continue with the 100th each time.
I hope it does not get compromised by that time.  :-\

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Yes, its painful work and guys please learn from my story be careful about your hardware wallet. Im literally in nerve wrecking situation right now.

I don’t understand why you don’t see your address if you follow the advice from @xenon131 post? Is it possible you have the wrong seed? Alternatively you can try this tutorial which includes Ian Coleman's BIP39 tool, maybe this way you may find it easier to find the private key of your ETH address.

Generate private keys (advanced) (https://support.ledger.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005297709-Export-your-accounts)

I think the second step is wrong.
You shouldn't be choosing ledger or hardware wallet anymore.

You are just recovering from seed.

@Lucius, I am pretty confident the seed is perfectly written down and I also had individual snaps of each out of extra caution. I have cross verified those with the one I have written down. I will go through your tutorial. Thanks for sharing it.

@bitmover, I am not getting my address in the Ethereum HD derivation path, so now I have started looking in both of them.

Will go through lucius's method and see what it has to offer.  Will update this soon, just as an experience. Thank you guys.

How are you screening address? By clicking "Next" on MEW? That will take forever. Instead, download Ian Coleman's page from here (https://github.com/iancoleman/bip39), run it an offline computer, enter your seed phrase, select coin "Ethereum", choose "BIP32" under "Derivation Path", in the box "BIP32 Derivation Path" enter m/44'/60'/0' and scroll down. You can generate 100s of address in a single click. If you still don't find it, I would try the following paths in the "BIP32 Derivation Path" box in the first instance:

m/44'/60'/1'
m/44'/60'/2'
m/44'/60'
m/44'/60'/0

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Did you ever add this Ethereum account to Ledger Live? If you did, you should be able to simply open Ledger Live, click "Accounts", click on your Ethereum account, click the "Edit account" button at the top right (looks like a wrench), then click "Advanced", and it will tell you the derivation path of your address.

Is it possible you added an extra word to the seed when you created your wallet the first time! Because I can't think of any other reason why you can't recover it. It's supposed to be a straightforward process.
The 25th word (aka passphrase) is totally different from the password. It's part of the seed and if you add it you will get a different wallet with different addresses.
Probably this is why you don't see your addresses when you recover your wallet with only 24 words (which is the main purpose of using a passphrase).

Hey o_e_l_e_o,

Yes I am working on the Ian Coleman's stuff only. This was the thing suggested by Lucius earlier to generate private keys using that Ian Coleman's BIP39 tool (https://iancoleman.io/bip39/).(on ledger support page).  

Answering to your second doubt, it's other way around. I simply initiated my ledger for the first time, noted the seeds, set up the passcode. After this went through the settings but did not change anything.
Then to use the bitcoin wallet I downloaded Ledger Wallet Bitcoin, set up the address etc.

For ETH transactions, I simply opened up MEW (while Ledger was connected) and selected Ledger as option to access my wallet.

After this I got the address, and used it for transacting.


I will checkout this in my next sitting.

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I was very cautious while setting up the Ledger. I am confident there is no 25th word.

And yes, after reading all the posts now I am all under pressure whats wrong with my process! Dam.

Can you clarify what you mean by a "passcode", since this is not a standard term? Do you mean the PIN, which would be a number of between 4 and 8 digits which you used to unlock your Ledger Nano? Or do you mean the passphrase, which is a word/number/phrase/string which you added to your seed phrase?

And have you been able to recover access to your bitcoin addresses using the same seed phrase you have backed up?

If you cannot find your Ethereum address on any of the standard derivation paths, then the most likely alternatives are that you set up a passphrase or your seed phrase is incorrect, unless you have been able to successfully access your bitcoin (or other altcoin) addresses using the same seed phrase.