Bitcoin-qt: wallet.dat corrupt, salvage failed

[lolika]

guy need little help to recover my bitcoin wallet.
its from around 2012-2013 and password protected. i know my password. i think its got correputed first place because the large number of transactions/addresses generated.
file size over 1MB. i have used that wallet for transactions years. didnt think much of it till now because the high bitcoin price (over 10k) i might have some bitcoin stuck in that wallet.
back then 100-200btc was easy to loose and i didn't really care about it



error message getting on win 10 64bit (or any other windows or ubuntu)
wallet.dat corrupt, salvage failed

when the bitcoin client start it just giving me that error message and change the wallet.dat file to a .BAK file


i have tried so far the following:  

under windows: C:\Program Files (x86)\Bitcoin>bitcoin-qt.exe -salvagewallet >> the result zero, something pops up fast and gone. nothing change, no extra files for possible extracted priv keys or addresses

under ubuntu i have tried pywallet no success. i dont remember the error or anything this give me but i can reproduce up on request.


please dont ask me to send over the wallet to check out!
what i can offer for the help is, if i able to recover and find any balance on it, i can send you reward for that in bitcoin.

[1714950262]

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[1714950262]

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[Welsh]

Make sure that you have a backup of the corrupted wallet before doing this even though it's corrupted back ups are handy to keep around to try other ways of recovering the data. You could create a small partition on a flash drive, and copy the corrupted wallet.dat to that partition. Before following this guide you can also try and find the mkey and ckey with a hex editor to see if there are any addresses that are in the corrupted file.

Then run this via pywallet command:

Code:

 sudo ./pywallet.py --recover --recov_device <location of partition> --recov_size 1Gio --recov_outputdir <Your desired location> 

If the command worked correctly, it will now ask you to enter your password, which if correct will then show a message along the lines of:

Code:

All the found encrypted private keys have been decrypted.
The wallet is encrypted and the passphrase is correct 

If everything has been followed and has worked it should then start importing the keys, which you can then check to see if any of these change addresses contain any of your Bitcoin.

[onnz423]

Well, since pywallet did not work i did some googling for you and found a few things to try, although recovering can be sometimes rather challenging.
First method i would try would be the Bitcoin private key/wallet.dat data recovery tool! which i found on bitcointalk.
However this method takes some technical knowledge and could be possibly dangerous for your data if not done carefully.

However, if you're running windows, then i'd just try Spinrite first because it's fairly easy to use, however im not actually sure if it would work for wallet.dat very well.
Good luck and please keep us updated.

[Rabinovitch]

Make sure that you have a backup of the corrupted wallet before doing this even though it's corrupted back ups are handy to keep around to try other ways of recovering the data. You could create a small partition on a flash drive, and copy the corrupted wallet.dat to that partition. Before following this guide you can also try and find the mkey and ckey with a hex editor to see if there are any addresses that are in the corrupted file.

Then run this via pywallet command:

Code:

 sudo ./pywallet.py --recover --recov_device <location of partition> --recov_size 1Gio --recov_outputdir <Your desired location> 

If the command worked correctly, it will now ask you to enter your password, which if correct will then show a message along the lines of:

Code:

All the found encrypted private keys have been decrypted.
The wallet is encrypted and the passphrase is correct 

If everything has been followed and has worked it should then start importing the keys, which you can then check to see if any of these change addresses contain any of your Bitcoin.

I have successfully copied wallet.dat that is "corrupt, salvage failed". I'm trying to recover it with pywallet following your advice (I found some old 2.5" HDD for that and made an 1Gb partition), but with no result no matter what exactly am I trying to do. I was trying to recover the wallet reading the partition first and then the file itself, but every time I get this (in case of partition reading):


or this (in case of readinf the wallet.dat itself):


Note that I know the password for damaged wallet.dat, but why there are no any keys after scanning?

In case of another wallet.dat, for which I don't know the exact password, I see some result:

Code:

Read 0.0 Go in 0.0 minutes

Found 1 possible wallets
Found 329 possible encrypted keys
Found 0 possible unencrypted keys

Possible wallet #1
    with passphrase #1

Private keys not decrypted: 329
Trying all the remaining possibilities (329) might take up to 1 minutes.
Do you want to test them? (y/n): y

But how can I recover that first wallet, which seems to be invisible for pywallet?  

[HCP]

It would appear that you wallet.dat is completely corrupted and PyWallet is unable to find anything that appears to be keys etc.

Is that wallet.dat the "original" file or one that you've already attempted to use -salvagewallet on?

[Rabinovitch]

It would appear that you wallet.dat is completely corrupted and PyWallet is unable to find anything that appears to be keys etc.

Is that wallet.dat the "original" file or one that you've already attempted to use -salvagewallet on?

Probably it's a "salvagewalleted" copy. I'll try to scan original copy.

p.s. no matter which copy I use - there is still no result.

[HCP]

Given that you are able to run PyWallet OK on another file and it is able to detect wallet file and possible keys, we can rule out PyWallet not working correctly...

So, I would say that leaves the following possibilities:

- The wallet file is totally corrupted and possibly beyond repair
or
- It isn't a Bitcoin Core wallet file

[nc50lc]

If your wallet.dat file is still on its original location and disk (2012-2013 HDD)...
Try to "check disk" and "attempt to recover bad sectors" the original drive where it came from for file system errors using Windows or any available disk checking sofware.
Any other copied version of a corrupted file cant be fixed by doing that method, because the broken pieces might have been lost in the disk's master boot record.

If it came from a Deleted File or Formatted Disk, the chance for it to be permanently corrupted is high.
All you can do is to find a software that can read corrupted wallet.dat files into human recognizable hashes, if you're lucky, you might find the private keys of the addresses with balance.

[bob123]

Try to "check disk" and "attempt to recover bad sectors" the original drive where it came from for file system errors using Windows or any available disk checking sofware.
Any other copied version of a corrupted file cant be fixed by doing that method, because the broken pieces might have been lost in the disk's master boot record.

Your option most probably won't work.
Recovering bad sectors does not work. Once some parts of your hard drive are gone, the files are irreversible deleted.
All you can do is to mark those bad sectors, so they won't get used again in the future.

The Master boot record is a boot sector. It contains information about logical partitions, file system, etc..
This is completely unrelatd to this topic. And nothing 'can be lost in the master boot record'.

Such statements confuse people who are not very techy. Please don't spread false information.

All you can do is to find a software that can read corrupted wallet.dat files into human recognizable hashes, if you're lucky, you might find the private keys of the addresses with balance.

OP did use pywallet. Pywallet does scan a drive for wallet files and tries to dump the private keys.

[nc50lc]

-snip-

Hmm, nope. Where do you think those recoverable chunks of data came from when a "data recory software" attempts to recover a deleted file or formatted disk?

What I'm trying to say is: those copies he have are corrupted due to copying a corrupted file, he can't attempt to fix the copies but the original file has a chance.
If it is a simple file system error, the disk check procedure might fix it.
The other options are just added, those wont hurt the process at all if there'a no problem in the hardware.