Sorry about the radio silence, pandemic and school have been a bit distracting. I'll probably delete the block chain since I wont be needing it and use pywallet to try and extract the privkeys. Thank you all for the advice, I'll come back with the outcome.

Its possible that the keys I extracted were of the blank wallets I created when first messing around with Bitcoin core before making this post. Hence why I asked a bit about how it extracts the private keys.


Since I was never able to open the wallet or even load it, I suspected that the key dump didnt even include it, but to be fair I have no idea how this all works.

Identical just as in, after importing all the keys, none of the tabs changed except for the addresses tab. I'll leave Electrum open for a while, to let it sync. The wallet was made around 2012, and could have been used up until around 2015, which is when my brother gave me the laptop.

Electrum shows what appear to be all 2000 "receiving" addresses in the appropriate tab and the green network icon. If these are the keys from the old wallet.dat then it is showing 0 transactions and balance for all balances.

Awesome sauce, So i found a way in notepad++ and imported every single (2000) private keys into Electrum, but balance is empty and no history has shown. Matter of fact, Electrum looks identical, other than the fact that its a new wallet.

Few side notes, In the keys dump file there is also 2000 strings, all starting with 0014, next to unique addresses.

Another clarification just for my own sake of knowledge, does the key dump from Core actually contain the old wallet data?  I had the Wallet file in the bitcoin wallet directory but was never able to actually open it in btc, and the bitcoin core install was entirely new. Does the dump keys command take data from all wallets or only the open ones?

Awesome, I have the addresses and all their keys, but in the dump there are, about 4000 address lines and the first few lines have all shown no transactions or balance.


Looking at the dump again, trying not to dox myself, I see the extended private master key and then the plethora of addresses and private keys before them, as well as an hdseed=1, reserve=1 and hdkeypath=m/0... on each line. My keys all start with K or L, don't see any 5's and my addresses all start with 3. The other problem I'm seeing is how ill copy and paste over 4000 strings into Electrum.

Thank you greatly with your help so far. If I were to use Electrum, I would need to extract the private keys from the wallet, correct? Whats the "Explain like I'm 5" way of doing it, bearing in mind I dont have an address or python knowledge. I can attempt the Bitcoin core method too, but seeing how my drive is probably not capable of it for much longer, I will eventually need to use Electrum.

Will try and get the keys through that tactic. And I'd say space then, I  only copied the wallet.dat over.

I could have done it on my SSD but most of them are used for work and games and didnt feel like moving around and deleting lots. I just used the HDD since it was useless and empty. But if more space is all i need to open it, i'll find a way.

I went to install an older version, 0.6.2.1, but once again my inexperience has bested me because i have no idea how to install it. And I'm just as experienced when it comes to Python as well.

It was able to open the wallet to 99% completion as seen in the pictures, but then came up with this error, also seen.

Took about 3 hours to "open", 11000000 ms





This error also appeared very often in the log, and by often i mean several every few or so lines.



I will attempt to find the right bitcoin core version and try that tactic.




luckily the old debug file still exists and i have exact dates

As of now the only error I've gotten with the wallet is that saying it was unable to load because the block chain became synchronized. The main problem I'm having is the wallet just not opening and taking forever to load.



Seems like it has to go through the entire block chain to load the wallet and find its transactions?



I'll leave the wallet opening for as long as possible and check the log after the error occurs. Worst case, I go back to the Electrum solution.

Also the harddrive only has about 4GB left before full, so hopefully transactions slow down until i figure this out haha. I'm using a totally blank (other than bitcoin core) HDD for this and dont have other options for storing the 280+GB chain.

To make sure I've done this correctly, when i import the old wallet, should i be doing that in the wallet directory? What I've done so far is make a new wallet in bitcoin core, shut it down, and then replace the wallet.dat with the old one. But now, as I type that out, it seems kind of stupid.

First thing I did after getting the wallet was dupe it a few times so I'm set on that front.
 I'll try just importing the wallet.dat again and see if it works now that its synchronized, and if not I'll try to use pywallet to hopefully pull the privatekeys from the wallet and import them into Electrum.

I moved the topic as that may be a better place to discuss this.


The old computer is sadly dead so all i have is the wallet folder i took from it.

As of right now i have the entire chain synchronized and downloaded, and every file from the bitcoin in the old computer now on my new computer. At first I did have a pruned block chain of about 10 GB but i remember an error saying the wallets last use was too long ago and that it had to use either the full chain or a larger prune to update. I made a new wallet in Bitcoin Core and imported all of those files, consisting of a database folder, .lock, .walletlock, blkindex.dat, db.log, debug.log, peers.dat, pywallet.py, readme (seems to be for a python extension?), wallet.dat and a wall.dat.bak.

Anytime im synced with the chain and try to open the wallet it just says "opening for seemingly forever" but eventually says it failed to open because the wallet de-synced.

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The topic began in the newbie section so pardon my ignorance, but where am I inputting these commands? As of right now i only have Bitcoin core and the folder with the imported wallet.
Theres the console in bitcoin core but i cant actually open the wallet in bitcoin core and havent used bitcoin core other than this.

Hi! Beginner here.

Long story short, my brother gave me his old laptop years ago and recently I found a bitcoin folder in the temp directory. I kept all the files within except for the old block chain, which at the time was only a couple gigabytes, but am having troubles opening it in a new wallet in bitcoin core. I synchronized with the chain and made a wallet with the new wallet.dat but it says that it may be corrupted, but when i include files like, .walletlock db.log and blk.index, it says its loading the wallet, but for an insane amount of time. So long that it usually says it failed because the chain desynced after 4 or so hours. There are more files that i kept within the wallet like pywallet.py and such and truly im not even sure this wallet is from bitcoin, so any help will be appreciated, ill keep an eye on this post.

Also i told my brother about this already and he said its fine that I try and recover the wallet, but he also doesnt really know how either.