I admit it, I'm confused

[Dysperium]

So I thought I had a pretty good grasp on this whole bitcoin thing. But as it turns out, I guess I don't. I made a couple of "offline" wallets with bitcoin-qt on Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS using usb drives as a virtual OS. So I made 2 wallets, populated 10 received addresses for each wallet, then saved out the wallet.dat files to another usb drive. So I've been using the addresses to get some free coins from the free bitcoin sites. After a couple of weeks I decided to sync these wallets just to see if things were going as I thought they should. Once I load them, and they are synced, neither of the wallets show any transactions. They both have the addresses I had originally made, so it doesn't seem like the wallet.dat files are bad, or that I messed up backing them up. Perhaps I did and just don't know. Anyway, so I looked up the addresses on blockchain.info and found that transactions had been made with the addresses used.

Here are 2 of the addresses if you'd like to check it out yourselves. Any help would be appreciated. Let me know if anymore info is needed. Thanks!

1AdyosNdGHYzkkMEQK9TkwrPs6NexDxfuY

15Fmaudd57QmZQgCX4o1AVmBFo5HYhir78

[John (John K.)]

Problem is with your bitcoin-qt client. Is it fully synced? Is there a small green tick by the right bottom corner? What is the block count? Which version is your client?

PS: Your coins are safe if it shows up in the blockchain.info, don't worry.

[Dysperium]

Yep, qt is definitely synced. The client is 0.7.2

[DannyHamilton]

I suspect you need to start Bitcoin-Qt up with the -rescan option:

- snip -
It's about this address:
16wJL3gZkrp2QpkszXFaa53twxodpT2kTP

It says it contains 1 BTC at blockchain.info.
- snip -
But according to QT it has 0 btc on it.
Even if I try to dump the private key it says :
- snip -

Fixed. The rescan option did it.
Should have tried it out before posting.
It didn't even took a long time after all.

Thanks.

========================

When I loaded the secure wallet.dat back into the ./bitcoin directory and launched the program, and waited some 18hrs for the blockchain to download (using bitcoin-qt 0.72) , the balance shows as 0! I expect 0.03 that I sent to be there, as seen here: http://blockexplorer.com/address/1KLzQCkiNpjBVJyEJaLSSUzC63xrG9S6MD

What the hell am I doing wrong?
-snip-

- snip -
If so, I'd suggest running Bitcoin-Qt from a command line with the -rescan option added to the command line.

This won't re-download the entire blockchain, so you won't have to wait the 18 hours again, but it will scan the entire blockchain that you have for any missed transactions.
- snip -

Thanks guys!  DannyHamilton's advice did the trick.  I guess this problem must be rare if the -rescan bit isn't in the wiki?  I believe I followed the steps exactly and still.  Glad these forums exist!

[Dysperium]

I was trying to find out how to do the rescan thing on a linux system, but all I could find was directions for Windows and Mac. Any ideas?

[DannyHamilton]

Just run Bitcoin-Qt from the command line with a space followed by -rescan added to the end of the command.

Code:

bitcoin-qt -rescan

How do you start it up typically?

Or maybe it is --rescan I can't remember

Code:

bitcoin-qt --rescan

[Dysperium]

I just tried starting qt from the terminal, but the line you gave didn't work. I normally start qt from the execute icon in the download folder (which is where I extracted it to). To be honest I'm a linux noob as well, haha!

[wickeRcL]

i've had no problems so far

[MarkyRamone]

i've had no problems so far

Me neither