reactivating an old wallet.dat

[melvster]

I have a very old wallet.dat (this is in the time before passwords)

I'm able to run bitcointools and pywallet on it and can see the labels, hashsec, sec etc.

Does anyone know a way to import it into some wallet software so that I can find out how many btc are there (if any)?

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[deepceleron]

You can simply rename the wallet.dat on your current Bitcoin installation, and temporarily put a copy of this old backup wallet.dat there. When you launch bitcoin with the -rescan option, it will update the wallet to show the correct balance. You can then also send the wallet balance to a new address, if you never expect anyone to send your old wallet payments and want to discard the backup.

Then put the original Bitcoin wallet.dat back and make another dated backup while you are thinking about it!

[melvster]

You can simply rename the wallet.dat on your current Bitcoin installation, and temporarily put a copy of this old backup wallet.dat there. When you launch bitcoin with the -rescan option, it will update the wallet to show the correct balance. You can then also send the wallet balance to a new address, if you never expect anyone to send your old wallet payments and want to discard the backup.

Then put the original Bitcoin wallet.dat back and make another dated backup while you are thinking about it!

Thanks!

Which clients would this work with?  Would I have to install bitcoin-qt (I understand it takes a day to download the block chain)

Or is there something more lightweight.

Slush once did this for me with some magic tools in about 30 minutes, but I forgot to ask him how ...

[BRules]

https://blockchain.info/wallet/import-wallet

[grue]

https://blockchain.info/wallet/import-wallet

or if you don't want to compromise your wallet, use pywallet and extract your keys to another client. (like electrum or multibit)