I'd try Bitcoin Core first... nothing to lose, easiest way to go about it. Just make a copy of the .dat file... then try opening it with Bitcoin Core... just be prepared to wait while it rescans the blockchain looking for transactions. Note this is NOT redownloading the blocks (assuming your node is NOT pruned), it just has to scan the block data.


Really depends on what wallet you want to import it too... But the --dumpwallet command should give you the private keys in WIF format... assuming that you include the --passphrase parameter when dumping the wallet.


For Bitcoin Core, you just use the importprivkey command on the console in Bitcoin Core (make sure to set rescan to false until you import the last key, otherwise it will run rescan every. single. time. )

Or you can look up one of the many many many guides on how to import private keys into Electrum... Like this one: https://bitcoinelectrum.com/importing-your-private-keys-into-electrum/

Google is your friend.

a recovered_wallet.dat may or may not open with Bitcoin Core... theoretically, it should be compatible, so you should be able to open it directly... but it's possible that pywallet is not creating it in a format that Bitcoin Core can handle.

In which case, dumping the private keys out of it, then importing those into the wallet of your choice would be a viable solution.


Note that Electrum would enable you to import and scan the keys in a matter of minutes, whereas rescanning in Bitcoin Core could take hours. Neither guarantees that the "keys" found are actually going to contain any coins.

Hello I used Recuva on an old HDD from 2013/2014 and found a wallet.dat file. Recuva said the wallet.dat file was in excellent condition. I tried using 2 versions of Bitcoin Core (0.21.1 and 0.8.6) to read the wallet.dat and was given the warning "wallet.dat corrupt, salvage failed". I installed Python 2.7.11, Pywallet, and all its dependencies and tried the following commands.


Pywallet DumpWallet Attempt:

Pywallet Recovery Attempt:
I reformatted a flash drive in FAT32 and put the wallet.dat file in it and attempted the following recovery code

The wallet.dat file is 328KB. I inspected it using a HexEditor and Notepad++ and it doesn't look corrupted. When I search notepad++ for 'key', there is 1 match, but when I search for 'name' there are no matches. My next step is to recover the HDD using GetDataBack instead of Recuva, and then reattempt what I have done so far. I would appreciate any help!