Electrum: watch only wallet to regular wallet, how?

[1tombj]

I've got a new install electrum watch only wallet with a small balance, an address that I imported from a failed armory installation (armory uses the whole blockchain and that exceeded the drive space on the target machine).  When I did the electrum install/import it would only create this wallet as watch only, or maybe I screwed up creating it.  I have the armory private keys for the address.  I made a second regular wallet in electrum.  How do I make a useable wallet out of this mess?

[shorena]

I've got a new install electrum watch only wallet with a small balance, an address that I imported from a failed armory installation (armory uses the whole blockchain and that exceeded the drive space on the target machine).  When I did the electrum install/import it would only create this wallet as watch only, or maybe I screwed up creating it.  I have the armory private keys for the address.  I made a second regular wallet in electrum.  How do I make a useable wallet out of this mess?

Make sure its a private key you import and not an address. A better option would probably to sweep the balance to a newly created electrum wallet that is covered by a seed though.

[1tombj]

thats what I'm trying to do; I can't see how to sweep OR import something that will create a spendable balance in this new wallet from the address I know has a balance.  The sweep button stays greyed out when I enter the armory private keys that were generated by armory.   there are two types,  privbase58 and privhexBE, I tried both, together and individually, with and without the privbase: prefixes and with and without the spaces between all of the characters in the key, with and without the address included and the sweep button still stays greyed out.  Thats most if not all of the possible permutations of entering this info.  What am I doing wrong?  I'm a btc newbie but pc literate and this is not going well.....

[shorena]

thats what I'm trying to do; I can't see how to sweep OR import something that will create a spendable balance in this new wallet from the address I know has a balance.  The sweep button stays greyed out when I enter the armory private keys that were generated by armory.   there are two types,  privbase58 and privhexBE, I tried both, together and individually, with and without the privbase: prefixes and with and without the spaces between all of the characters in the key, with and without the address included and the sweep button still stays greyed out.  Thats most if not all of the possible permutations of entering this info.  What am I doing wrong?  I'm a btc newbie but pc literate and this is not going well.....

Sounds like a formatting issue. You need a "WIF" (wallet import format) private key. If armory only gives you the key in hex you can convert it using e.g. https://www.bitaddress.org/

[1tombj]

you are correct:  I found another forum post somewhere that wif is base 58 with no spaces and to try the address with that.  I went ahead and did a reinstall of armory on  another drive, which took forever so I'll be using that for the moment but will revisit this issue and test the above when I have some time.

thanks!
tom