Help Restoring Wallet

[EcksDee2]

Hi there,

I have my wallet seed phrase as well as my password and a few of my addressees as well.  I am fairly certain that I have copied these down accurately.  However, when I go to restore my wallet using the seed phrase, the "next" button stays greyed out until I enter the first seven words of my seed.  I have twelve words total.  However, Electrum only seems to want to allow me to proceed with seven words.  If I do so, my wallet addresses are different and I have no BTC to spend.

Any help would be appreciated, thanks.

[Coin-Keeper]

You do NOT need your password at all if you are restoring a wallet from seed in Electrum.  Also, you don't need your address list either.  Electrum is an HD wallet so it will generate the addresses for you directly from the seed.  You can go to dozens of computers (not that you would of course) and by using the correct seed Electrum will always generate the exact same address list.  That is what HD stands for if you want to read about it.   Deterministic!

Now you need to determine; either your SEED is wrong, OR electrum/computer is glitched.  How familiar are you with diagnostics?  One simple thing that you can do is to download TAILS, which has Electrum in the build, and then mount the disk using your computer.  TAILS will mount in RAM eliminating any glitches in your current OS and/or any bad downloads of Electrum.  Just run/open Electrum and enter your seed.  If it comes up correctly and everything looks fine than you know its NOT your seed causing the issues.

Of course the obvious first step may be to delete Electrum and download a fresh copy.  Verify the download and install it again.  That is a couple of minutes at most.

Does the current Electrum function correctly using other wallets you may have?

[Abdussamad]

Hi there,

I have my wallet seed phrase as well as my password and a few of my addressees as well.  I am fairly certain that I have copied these down accurately.  However, when I go to restore my wallet using the seed phrase, the "next" button stays greyed out until I enter the first seven words of my seed.  I have twelve words total.  However, Electrum only seems to want to allow me to proceed with seven words.  If I do so, my wallet addresses are different and I have no BTC to spend.

Any help would be appreciated, thanks.

First of all please ignore the coin-keeper guy. He's sending you on a wild goose chase.

The reason the next button appears greyed out is that the seed you are typing in is incorrect. The words have to a) be correctly spelled and present in the electrum dictionary b) the order of the words has to be correct and c) the number of words also has to be correct.

In electrum wallets older than version 2.0 the number of words for the seed was 12. In new wallets created with version 2.0 and later the number of words is 13. It is possible to restore an old 12 word wallet in a current version (>2.x) wallet. But first you need to confirm that you indeed used a pre 2.0 version of electrum when you originally created your wallet. Is that correct? Do let us know the current version you are using to restore the wallet too?

If you say the wallet is of pre-2.0 origin then it has just 12 words in it's seed. So the quantity of words is correct. That leaves the order and spelling. Given below is the link to the electrum dictionary. See if the words you have are all present there:

https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/blob/master/lib/wordlist/english.txt

[NorrisK]

Are you running the latest version of electrum? If not, download that.

Next, you will want to create a new wallet in electrum and pick the option to restore your wallet using the seed.

Make sure you are not making typos while writing the seed down, one letter mistake will give you a completely different private key or it won't allow you to create the wallet if the word is not in the electrum dictionary.

[Coin-Keeper]

I wanted to thank the members in the previous two posts above this one.  I have never seen a grey'd out button on Electrum with my personal wallets.

Help us all to continue learning by considering answering this question for me/us:  Please!

Is there a scenario where a user has the CORRECT seed entered and Electrum would present a grey'd out button because his software/computer is corrupted?  My response was in consideration of a user attempting to type in their seed and then double checking it against a "list", where it appears to be correctly entered.

So you seem to be seeing that a grey'd out button is always because the seed entered does not mathematically resolve in Electrum therefore it "grey's out"?

[pooya87]

Is there a scenario where a user has the CORRECT seed entered and Electrum would present a grey'd out button because his software/computer is corrupted?

software being corrupted: i doubt it, even if you download a malicious software from another place other than electrum.org the way seed works is not going to be different.
even if the integrity of the downloaded file is damaged, then again i doubt it can happen.

computer corrupted: again i doubt it, because Electrum is not using any external resources like .net framework for some other applications or something similar. it is all in the code and has nothing to do with your computer for checking the correctness of seed!

So you seem to be seeing that a grey'd out button is always because the seed entered does not mathematically resolve in Electrum therefore it "grey's out"?

yes that is always the case.

i wouldn't say your solution is a "wild goose chase" but it is a solution for paranoid people and as the last resort!

download TAILS, which has Electrum in the build,

are you sure it has Electrum built in?
also why TAILS, you can do it with almost all other linux distros and i prefer downloading Electrum myself, checking the signature and installing it myself!
all of these can be done on a virtual machine.

TAILS will mount in RAM

to my knowledge this is wrong.
TAILS runs from the medium you are booting up (DVD, USB disk, External HDD,...)

download a fresh copy.  Verify the download and install it again.  That is a couple of minutes at most.

as long as you can do this, going to the trouble of downloading TAILS, checking your seed,... is not recommended.

[Coin-Keeper]

Is there a scenario where a user has the CORRECT seed entered and Electrum would present a grey'd out button because his software/computer is corrupted?

software being corrupted: i doubt it, even if you download a malicious software from another place other than electrum.org the way seed works is not going to be different.
even if the integrity of the downloaded file is damaged, then again i doubt it can happen.

computer corrupted: again i doubt it, because Electrum is not using any external resources like .net framework for some other applications or something similar. it is all in the code and has nothing to do with your computer for checking the correctness of seed!

So you seem to be seeing that a grey'd out button is always because the seed entered does not mathematically resolve in Electrum therefore it "grey's out"?

yes that is always the case.

i wouldn't say your solution is a "wild goose chase" but it is a solution for paranoid people and as the last resort!

download TAILS, which has Electrum in the build,

are you sure it has Electrum built in?
also why TAILS, you can do it with almost all other linux distros and i prefer downloading Electrum myself, checking the signature and installing it myself!
all of these can be done on a virtual machine.

TAILS will mount in RAM

to my knowledge this is wrong.
TAILS runs from the medium you are booting up (DVD, USB disk, External HDD,...)

download a fresh copy.  Verify the download and install it again.  That is a couple of minutes at most.

as long as you can do this, going to the trouble of downloading TAILS, checking your seed,... is not recommended.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this.  My reasoning on TAILS was that it eliminates any "funky" stuff in the computer's OS.  TAILS runs from disk and mounts in RAM leaving the hard drive's OS dis-mounted and therefore out of the loop.  I picked TAILS to know for certain that my OS was not a contributing factor.

Either way I see from you experienced members that a grey'd out button almost certainly indicates BAD seed, either poor typing by the user or the wrong words, etc....

I mostly typed this response to express my gratitude for helping the newer guys out here!!

[pooya87]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this.  My reasoning on TAILS was that it eliminates any "funky" stuff in the computer's OS.  TAILS runs from disk and mounts in RAM leaving the hard drive's OS dis-mounted and therefore out of the loop.  I picked TAILS to know for certain that my OS was not a contributing factor.

what i said about running from RAM was about completely running from RAM and not needing the boot medium any longer in other words it means you can remove the DVD, or USB from your computer by disconnecting them and continue using the OS like puppy linux

what you say is a different thing. it still needs the boot medium to operate so you can't remove it and about HDD drives, it is like this on all linux distros that i have seen (although i am not a linux expert and may be wrong) but they do not auto mount anything unless you choose to.
the difference in TAILS is that they removed the easy mount but it is still possible to mount the drives.

also the part about RAM is this:
"Tails is configured with special care to not use the computer's hard-disks, even if there is some swap space on them. The only storage space used by Tails is in RAM, which is automatically erased when the computer shuts down."