Help: Block chain won't catch up

[liam]

Howdy,

I'm relatively new to bitcoin and not interested in the technical ins-and-outs.

I've made over about a dozen successful transactions now, both sending and recieving. Recently however I've had a problem.

I was meant to recieve 50.229 bitcoins that were sent at the end of march but they never arrived in my wallet.

The problem seems to be because my client can't seem to catch up to the block chain. It's been stuck at block 170139 for a couple of weeks now.

The person who sent me the bitcoins suggested that it may be a connectivity problem to the network, however I always have 8 active connections. They also suggested it may take several hours to fully download the block chain, however I've left the client running for days now and it still hasn't budged one block.

Does anyone have any advice? Is there a way I can try re-installing my client? How can I go about this without loosing my entire wallet and the address the bitcoins were sent to?

Sorry this is probably excruciatingly simple and ignorant of me but I don't know where to begin with this.

Thanks!

[Foxpup]

First of all, to back up your wallet, assuming you're using the standard client, find the wallet.dat file in your bitcoin directory (location depends on operating system) and copy it to a safe location. Given the amount of money you've got, you really should be backing up your wallet at regular intervals anyway, even if you don't plan on reinstalling anything, in case your hard drive goes kaput and you lose everything or something else bad happens.

However, you probably don't need to reinstall bitcoin. It sounds like your copy of the blockchain may be corrupt. Assuming you're using the standard bitcoin client, close bitcoin, backup the files blk0001.dat and blkindex.dat in your bitcoin directory to another directory (note that you'll need a spare 1.5 GB of disk space), delete the originals, then restart bitcoin. This will cause it to download the whole blockchain again from scratch.

If it can't download the blockchain again at all, then you've got a network problem, and you should copy the blk0001.dat and blkindex.dat files back (after closing bitcoin) so that you don't have to download the blockchain again after you fix it.

If it is able to download the blockchain again without any problems, see if it can get past the troublesome block this time around and update successfully. If so, then the problem was that your original copy of the blockchain was corrupt, and you can delete your backup of the corrupt files, because there's no point keeping them around.

[liam]

Thanks for the help dude. I backed up my wallet and the suggestion to delete those .dll files and download the entire block chain again appear to have worked. Just broke the sticking point after about 24hrs of downloading. Fingers crossed it keeps moving along! Cheers