Yes, right, it's a real sentence, not words from the word list. Using brainwallet below: Is generating the keys a standardized algorithm? I guess you could use any algo to generate some hash codes from words?

Regarding berkley db, I found some article about that and I recovered several .dat files with that signature. I tried to open with pywallet --dumpwallet and they gave an error like invalid or corrupt database but one had 16kb and returned sth like PAGE_NOT_FOUND. Should all wallets be openable with pywallet or are the wallets specific to the tool which generated it? Maybe the PAGE_NOT_FOUND indicates that it is a berkley db but I'm using the wrong tool to open it?

Hi Charles-Tim,

thanks for your answer. The plan was that if we don't find the wallet to search for it by file signature on the hdd. That's the reason I'm asking if anyone knows how it could have been created these days so that I know what options could be and what to search for

He's not sure after so long time ago, but he remembers that sentence which - maybe by coincidence - has exactly 24 words. So we thought maybe this could be it. I know that's not a lot of information... 

Hello all,

my friend thinks he has some bitcoin from 2009/2010 on a certain address and wants to recover it. He had a wallet.dat those days but it was deleted on his computer. But he also thinks to know the 24 words.

1.) We wanted to try the words on a ledger but the ledger supports only a fixed set of words.

My question:
Are there other tools or did exist in the past with which he could have generated keys from a free choice of words? And if yes, I suppose we have to find the correct tool which was used in the past?!

2.) We tried to find the wallet.dat in the deleted files on his computer.

My question:
Let's assume we found it, we would have to know, with what tool it was created, right?

Do you have any ideas or remember what were the common tools or applications for that during that time or do you have any other recommendation how to approach this?

Thanks a lot,

Brgds,

Robert