Bitcoin Forum

hi i recently had to update windows and in this process stupidly didnt think about my wallet. i partially recorved my wallet.dat file but need help from here to have it fully working again. im not that good at understanding the process of stuff still but i can follow instuctions well. can anyone please help?

You should describe exactly what you mean by "update" and "recovered my wallet.dat". Did you install windows updates? Did you put in a new hard drive and reinstall windows? Did you format your drive? It is hard to prescribe a course of action without knowing what you did, what wallet software you are using, what windows you are using, etc.

Might be worth a try:

Backup your "salvaged" wallet.dat.

Install a fresh, single copy of Bitcoin Core. Start it once, so it creates the data directory structure. Shut it down (might take a little time). Copy a copy of your salvaged wallet.dat to the data directory [1]. Start it again and maybe you are in luck and you see your transactions in the transactions tab (they will be greyed out until the blockchain is synced).

If you are not, another approach is using a tool called pywallet [2] by the user jackjack to export any private keys it can find and import them to Bitcoin Core (or another wallet of your choice). Like deepceleron said, the more information you can provide, the better.



From now on, please start backing up your wallet information on a regular basis. A recommended interval for Bitcoin Core is every ~50 tx. If you haven't already done so, encrypting your wallet is also recommended.


[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Data_directory
[2] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=34028.0

i tried it but got message saying wallet.dat corrupt, failed salvage. does this mean my money is lost.