Trying to recover broken multibit wallets. ( 1BTC reward for tip that fixes it)

[DanielVG]

A few years ago in bought my first bitcoins and i played around with them using satoshidice and multibit.
I think my wallets got problems cause i generated too much adresses and bad transactions and now it seems that some coins are stuck in it.
i have more than 1 wallet like this, actually alot...
I think In some of them its just an error and there are no coins anymore in the wallet.
In other ones i'm pretty sure some coins are stucked.
I'm trying to get them out but without succes so far.
If you help me figure this out i will be very generous in donations.
The person that gives me a good solution will get 1 BTC and others who were helpfull can also expect something.  It might  as well be that there is nothing to recover, but my gutfeeling and memory says differently. These wallets are from 2011 so i dont remember very well what i exactly did. I rememeber satoshidice and alot of waiting...
I've got moderate digital skills so any idea or question you shoot at me please step by step.

The first problem i have is that the Wallet are old and have alot of adresses in it so if i load them up in multibit it tries to synchronize and then gets stuck. Even if i leave it open for 2 days.  I can see it starts loading some blocks in the message tab but after a few msgs it stops.
I never made backups, i never extracted keys, i was having too much fun with satoshidice till the thing broke and i thought, "ill fix it another day". 

[nefron]

post a screenshot let others see wat r u upto

[jim618]

Anything from 2011 would be using the old serialised format wallets.

BEFORE using this tip make sure you backup all your wallets !

Once or twice I used a hex editor to recover the private keys from some wallets so you might try that.
There is a how-to here:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=43616.msg909038#msg909038

[DanielVG]

thanks for the link jim, i'll check it out.


I made an example in screenshots.


Everything seems to be good and ready to use:


Try to send it another wallet and it seems to work.
It says, butcoins succesfully send. seen by one peer.
 

BUt when i check the transactions on blockexplorer or chainblock:



When i restart multibit or reset ,the coins reappear and the same story starts over&over again.  It's never the same amount though..I've seen 26, 19, 8, 4, 12, all on the same wallet.

[DanielVG]

oh and everytime i restart multibit it has to sync for over 2 hours which makes it hard to experiment.

[jim618]

I would try exporting your private keys and moving them to blockchain.info to see what BTC was on them.
There is a how-to in the help here:

https://multibit.org/en/help/v0.5/help_movingAWallet.html