Help! I moved my wallet.dat to a new computer, and now it's empty.

[Brainbuster]

I was using Bitcoin Core qt

My 2 year old laptop couldn't download the blockchain, several days went by
and it was stuck at 2 hours behind...for days....2 hours behind.

So I actually bought a Sager notebook for $1,7000...very expensive, highest scoring benchmark SSD.
It's 20 times faster than my old laptop.  This was mainly so I could get my bitcoins.

I moved my wallet.dat file from the bitcoin directory to an external hard drive.

Then installed bitcoin core qt on my new Sager.
It downloaded the entire blockchain in 15 minutes as I recall--extremely fast.

But now when I double-click the wallet.dat file (and bitcoin qt core program opens it),
I get this message:  "Bitcoin Payment Request File Handling- payment request file cannot be read.  This can be caused by an invalid payment request file."

Does anyone know what I did wrong??  And how do I open these wallet.dat files?

Thank you!

[BTT]

I was using Bitcoin Core qt

My 2 year old laptop couldn't download the blockchain, several days went by
and it was stuck at 2 hours behind...for days....2 hours behind.

So I actually bought a Sager notebook for $1,7000...very expensive, highest scoring benchmark SSD.
It's 20 times faster than my old laptop.  This was mainly so I could get my bitcoins.

I moved my wallet.dat file from the bitcoin directory to an external hard drive.

Then installed bitcoin core qt on my new Sager.
It downloaded the entire blockchain in 15 minutes as I recall--extremely fast.

But now when I double-click the wallet.dat file (and bitcoin qt core program opens it),
I get this message:  "Bitcoin Payment Request File Handling- payment request file cannot be read.  This can be caused by an invalid payment request file."

Does anyone know what I did wrong??  And how do I open these wallet.dat files?

Thank you!

First, close the Bitcoin-Qt client.

Then you have to localize your Bitcoin folder. For Windows, it should be here:

%APPDATA%\Bitcoin

In that folder, there should be a wallet.dat file.

If you have currently no bitcoins in the wallet, you can just delete that file and replace it with your backup wallet.dat file.

When you placed the wallet.dat file in place, you should run Bitcoin-Qt. Here's how to do that in Windows:

Now Bitcoin-Qt should start and rescan the blockchain to calculate the balances of the addresses in your wallet.dat file.

[DannyHamilton]

- snip -
you can just delete that file
- snip -

Be very careful about following the advice of a user that only has a half dozen posts.

There's a good chance that they are giving very dangerous advice that could make your situation worse.

In this particular instance, most of the advice they gave is pretty good.  However, I would recommend creating a backup of that wallet.dat file on the computer, and then I would rename the original instead of deleting it.  That way if you are mistaken about it not having any bitcoins you can still recover.