Warning cannot read wallet file

[kilner]

So getting this error when trying to open my electrum wallet. And my default_wallet file looks really odd, here's a bit of it:

XÖm//›J¢Úáý¾üädˆÕ_¥®õ‚wA$˜Û1¢6›Õ�Àõ7õÍ\ED;w¿­>O×»zǯ$ó8_©íH`÷L~öhǯ$ó8_©íH`÷L~öhǯ$ó8_©íH`švVô
 ¶<�ž¶=ät^é�êÞ®¸Ç‚‘6B'3¬zë¢rB‚ª°Ì3CïÕBü
0Îò[2XO‚ÀpM‰qÖ!ͼ$ĸ:ÁÑ„K–Å
áñ�7þ®Ì‡†y™bc)áæºzǯ$ó8_©íH`÷L~öhǯ$ó8_©íH`÷L~öhǯ$ó8_©íH`÷L~öhǯ$ó8_©íH`÷L~öhǯ$ó8_©íH`÷L~öhǯ$ó8_©íH`÷L~öhǯ$ó8_©íH`÷L~öhǯ$ó8

Any ideas?

(I do not have seeds or private keys)

[LOBSTER]

Do you have an encryption?

I would say that the file may be damaged.

[btchris]

That's definitely not a normal Electrum wallet file—a normal one would contain a bunch of readable text.

I'd suggest you look over here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=998480.msg10842688#msg10842688


As an aside: this is the third or fourth time in just three weeks that someone has posted about a corrupted Electrum wallet file... I wouldn't call that a pattern just yet, but it's getting close....

[ThomasV]

which version of Electrum were you using?
(a wallet corruption bug was fixed in version 2.0.3)

[ThomasV]

were you using any plugins?

[ThomasV]

As an aside: this is the third or fourth time in just three weeks that someone has posted about a corrupted Electrum wallet file... I wouldn't call that a pattern just yet, but it's getting close....

I believe most of the previous bug reports were related to the following bug: https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/issues/960
That bug was caused by daemon threads, that were killed while they were writing to the wallet file.

I made an initial fix for that bug, which was included in version 2.0.3.
https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/commit/72688a5cfa25066d1fd6eee646b874725359ff04

An extra safety against daemon threads was added here (in version 2.0.4):
https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/commit/1369c02011720706d47a0a0957f73c85a82693f0

We do not know if the bug reported in this thread has the same cause, but I would not say that I see the same pattern.
Two things differ:
 - the wallet file of the user is not empty but corrupted
 - version 2.0.3 was used, which included one of the fixes for that bug.

[btchris]

Someone suggested Pywallet for recovery.

Would this help with my situation or any other programs out there that would? And how do I go about installing it on Linux?

All I have is the assumed corruped default.wallet file and a list of two addressess in the wallet with coin.

pywallet will not find Electrum seeds or xprvs.

For Linux, run this in a terminal to search your drive:

Code:

sudo strings -100 `df ~ | tail -1 | cut -d' ' -f1` | egrep '"x/1?": "|"seed": "' | egrep -v '"xpub|strings'

If it outputs any lines, save them and let us know how many "seed" or "x/" lines it found.

[btchris]

That code doesen't seem to do anything in the terminal even with another wallet.

Do you mean that you created a new empty Electrum wallet, and the code doesn't find it?

Does it take a while to finish running, or does it return right away?

Is your wallet file saved in the default location?

[btchris]

As soon as I enter that in the terminal it asks for my password then nothing just a new command line appears straight away.

You are entering your password when asked, correct? After that, it should take 10s of minutes before it completes and displays another shell prompt (if I got it right).

Are you copying and pasting the line (there are a number of different quote characters, it'd be easy to get one wrong if you're not copying and pasting)?

What does this give you?

Code:

df ~

It should give you two lines like this, or is it different?

Code:

Filesystem     1K-blocks    Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1        8640920 6298256   1880688  78% /

[btchris]

Yeah just copy and paste.

df ~ gets me this:

Filesystem          1K-blocks    Used Available Use% Mounted on
/home/nuke/.Private 149545252 7287928 134637740   6% /home/nuke

Oh... you're using ecryptfs-style home directory encryption. That makes things a lot more difficult and also a lot less likely to succeed.

I just tried running a test where I overwrote 5 encrypted files and deleted 5 others, and then tried to recover them, and it didn't succeed for any of them. Short of a professional service, I doubt you have much recourse (and even then it seems unlikely).