Bitcoin Forum

Hi all,

Years ago when bitcoin was starting out i generated some coins.. I have the wallet.day file but when i replace it with mine and start the program up, The program crashes with an error...

Did i encrypt it ?

Cheers.

Hopefully you have a wallet.dat file. 

Sorry for the mistype, Yes.. I have a wallet.dat file..

Do you know why its doing this ??

No.  What is the error?

There error just states that the program quit unexpectedly, No reason :(

All though in db.txt this is generated:

C:\Users\User Name\AppData\Roaming\Bitcoin\wallet.dat: file size not a multiple of the pagesize

Hmmm.. thoughts ?

Even if corrupted, it's probably quite recoverable...

do you know how to use a hex editor?  can you search for bytes in it?  I can tell you magic sequences to look for, that if you can pull the bytes immediately surrounding them, you can reconstruct a brand new wallet file and recover all the coins...

the magic bytes you should be most interested in are: 01 03 6b 65 79 41 04

tell us how many times this sequence occurs in your file...

each time you see this sequence, there should be the bytes "04 20" soon thereafter (within the next few hundred bytes)... the 32 bytes coming after each 04 20 are a private key that may unlock a portion of your wallet.  the average wallet should have >100 of these, but one from a very old version of bitcoin might have fewer.

Thanks for the awesome reply !

I'm not to familiar with hex.. And wouldnt really what i'd be doing... What if i where to make you a deal ?

if you add me on skype.. I'll send you the wallet.dat file out of good will and trust.. You see if its fixable.. Half of whats on there is yours ?

I'm at work and don't have skype on this, but my e-mail is mcaldwell@mc2cs.com...

If you're able to use PGP, my key fingerprint is F1175A23, otherwise, I can probably crunch it quickly enough to let you know if it's any good before anyone else could ever get to it...

No dramas bro, I'll just send it straight across..  ;D

Successfully broke open the wallet using a custom program to scan for magic bytes.  Total contents: 0.00814646 BTC.

When I transfer that to another address you will be able to see which address(es) held the BTC, until then, I don't have an easy way to tell.

Once I send the funds to another address, if you were to give someone else the same wallet file who had the same capability I do, they could confirm that I was honest about the balance and that none of the funds were recently transferred off.  (I suppose I am saying this merely for the sake of sharing an understanding of how the system works.)

(procedure I used: custom program loads the whole file...scans for 0x04 0x20... grabs 32 bytes afterwards...converts that to a wallet import format string.  I pipe all of those strings into a script.  I run importprivkey on each of them.  My importprivkey patch is modified so it doesn't rescan the wallet right away, so I can bulk-load hundreds of private keys quickly.  Then I manually shut down bitcoind, restart it with -rescan which takes several minutes, and voila, any funds that show up must have been in the original wallet.)

Woaaah, Thanks man !

Wow.. i though i might of had a bit more coins then that...

Are you using windows yeah ? You should do a tut.. With pics :P



Thank you soo much !

What 'Custom Program' did you use ?

pywallet?

Custom program means I went into MS Visual Studio and wrote some code to scan the file.

May paste that code shortly. Am posting from my phone right now.

What a legend. What'd you code it in ? C#?

hi,
i have a (sort of) similar problem. don't know can it be solved, by ill ask anyway :)

one year ago (approx) my co-worker told me about bitcoin mining. at that time, my VGA was crappy, so i tried to mine with CPU - just to see what it is all that stuff :). naturally, it didn't lasted much, since mining was very poor. I cant remember whether i installed bitcoin wallet or not at that time. Think not - but cant be sure. I'm positive however, that I re-installed my OS in the meantime (switched from slackware to ubuntu). Even worst, i have a spare windows partition (to play games when my wife is not around ;) ). so i basically don't know ANYTHING on how my software configuration looked at that time :(

back in present day....

i bought 2 sapphire 6950, unlock them to 6970 and start mining. after a week, i transferred hard earned 2.69 BTC to some (obviously) old wallet address (i presume for that one year old one, missed in action in the meantime). so my first coins ended in some void. is there any way to bring them back?

thanks in advance

ps: i use deepbit