Normal symbols in my wallet.dat?

[Henke79]

I cannot open  my wallet.dat... Is these normal symbols when i open it with wordpad?
the wallet is from 2011....


Tº¥À«ènÉ«Ó
ÓPÂ@¿h8̈c­Y
h‘Ý:‡ð™ñŸ  
 
poolP       N
�~  š®¾L    A³   òx³p0‘œqLªæJß©ç…˜ù@\ÎÄäã\´ïÁ;™£7ÄtàšÚôûŠÍQ!a€UÐ/ç  
 
poolO       N
�~  š®¾L    AƒP‘!”î¹Ý‰jäÏ[@'R8ï4M0šf“Íõ5f0ZÇ‚U©&#<{„<ˆ7“$¥sb  

[SopaXT]

To import your wallet.dat into Bitcoin Core, you'll need to copy it into the data directory, see https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Data_directory.

And yes, that is completely normal (the format of the wallet file is binary, with ASCII field names).

[achow101]

The wallet.dat file is not a text file, it is a binary file. If you want to see what data it contains, you will need to open it in a hex editor. To actually figure out what the data is, you will need to use Berkeley DB's database tools (specifically db_dump). Otherwise the data will not be in any recognizable form.

[tomasooz]

Henke93,

Do you still need assistance recovering your wallet?
Let us know please, will be glad to help.

Thanks!

[Reefdogg]

About the wallet.dat file , there are keywords like "pool" , "name" , mkey,  key! , ckey! , keymeta! and after the keywords is encoded data ..... I have tried to cut and past keyword sections of the file into another and it does not work.  I would try to replace a "pool" section from one file to another and that basically just breaks your wallet.  I think the keyword sections are linked in a way I don't understand.  Maybe someone here can point to a page that explains that in detail.

[SopaXT]

About the wallet.dat file , there are keywords like "pool" , "name" , mkey,  key! , ckey! , keymeta! and after the keywords is encoded data ..... I have tried to cut and past keyword sections of the file into another and it does not work.  I would try to replace a "pool" section from one file to another and that basically just breaks your wallet.  I think the keyword sections are linked in a way I don't understand.  Maybe someone here can point to a page that explains that in detail.

The wallet file is actually a Berkeley database.
The keywords are the keys of the key-value pairs stored there, and some encoded data follows each key and value.

To decode them, a tool such as pywallet would be needed.