i don't understand. your wallet.dat IS your private keys.

i followed the instructions to the letter from the original post that started this thread. so i'm not sure what you're talking about....

hi,

two years ago i bought a load of bitcoins and stored them offline,
unencrypted, following the exact process outlined in the original post in this thread.

today i decided to sell them. so i retrieved my wallet.dat file from storage.

then i downloaded the bitcoin client. then i pasted my wallet.dat in the correct place and let it run for 8 hours until it
had synced. it was just about to finish syncing when i got the
error message saying "file corrupt. salvage failed."

then i tried to see if i could upload the file to a blockchain wallet.

i got an error message saying something along the lines of "invalid file
type or incorrect password, no keys uploaded."

so there must be something wrong with my wallet.dat file. but i have no
idea how it became corrupted and what I can do about it to recover my
bitcoins.

i am pretty tech savvy, as far as using windows goes. but when it comes to
playing around in linux and source code, i have no idea. (i use an ubuntu
machine for all my bitcoin work.)

any suggestions would be gratefully appreciated...