Recover Wallet Seed.
Firstly this was a specific case, I doubt that you will be facing the same situation. I'm afraid that very little can be done if you no longer have access to your private keys, mnemonic seed, etc.. I can only recommend that you think it through before diving into crypto and do your due diligence in understanding the technology and have updated backups ready.
I was in the process of claiming Bitcoin Gold from a cold storage electrum wallet. I zeroed my balance by transfering to another wallet and saved the original private key on a plain text file on the flash drive.
Installed coinomi on android and created a bitcoin gold wallet. I saved the mnemonic seed on the same text on the flash drive and generated a password, swept the private keys and transfered the balance to an exchange.
This is where I started making the mistakes, thinking i would no longer need the password I deleted the plain text file on the flash drive with the mnemonic seed and password for the wallet, I also forgot to delete the wallet in coinomi,
The next day I decided to do the same thing for a friend that wasn't able to transfer his btg balance.
I opened the coinomi wallet with the zeroed balance, swept the private keys and sure enough the balance is there.
As I start the transfer to another exchange the password prompt comes up. After a couple of futile attempts the prompt to recover using the mnemonic seed shows up and obviously I don't have it as I have already deleted the text file.
Sh*t out of luck!
After a couple of minutes of thinking it through, I realized that I had saved the recovery seed on a plain text file on a 4gb flash drive and after the first process of zeroing the wallet I had then deleted the file.
I then imaged the drive using dd and I realized that the mnemonic word list is already known and is easily found on git repositories.
so i ran the following command:
while read line; echo "$line"; do grep -a "$line" sdd.img; done < wordlist
and after a couple of lines a got a hit
alarms
album
alchemy
alerts
algebra
alkaline
alley
almost
aloof
alpine
already
<key>is.alreadyindexed</key>
also
..
amnesty
among
amply
amused
anchor
android
anecdote
angled
ankle
climb tour guitar plane different house chair tulips dauntless eagle ankle eagle greater hunter itinerary knapsack lifestyle megabyteKate Swap File 2.0yU�3ms�~��xh��u�`SWESESI 8z4SLmAKcvueUwsrw53bRguJclimb tour guitar plane different house chair tulips dauntless eagle ankle eagle greater hunter itinerary knapsack lifestyle megabyte
annoyed
answers
antics
As you can see from above got a hit on ankle with the rest of the mnemonic seed all lined up.
and sure enough I was able to recover the wallet using the menmonic seed.
Thinking about the process there a couple of mistakes made along the way:
- Always write the seed on a piece of paper! For convenience i pasted the seed on a plain text file.
- Should have deleted the coinomi wallet instead of reusing the same wallet.
- As the for the plain text file, would be better to save in a password manager or an encrypted text file
- Should have securely deleted the plain text file.
- Should not have used an unencrypted flash drive for transfering private keys or writing sensitive information
Thankfully it ended well, so plan ahead and do your due diligence.
Hope this helps someone...
Tips welcome:
bitcoin:1LtcEQnRJgPeFpbwUaLJeWVxisP4KFYfzP
