My Electrum stopped working on Windows 10. Wallet is watch only. REWARD AVAIL!

[dannyboys]

My Electrum stopped working on Windows 10 tonight. Some error like script not running. Stupid me uninstalled it to reinstall it and used an uninstaller which cleared out my wallets. I had written down two seeds but they don't seem to be the ones or to work.

All I know is the address that the BTC was sent to and the wallet is now 'watch only' - like it's teasing me. Ugh. I am sure it will be locked there away forever but does anyone know of any way there's a chance to get it back.

I would be willing to give my two sets of seed words I have if someone could try for me and not rip me off. I'd at least give you $50 USD of the $300.

I would sincerely appreciate anyone's help with this!

Thank you,
DB

[RapTarX]

If you seed key isn't working for you, it will not work for anyone else. Probably you have written down the wrong seed key. There's no way of recovering your btc from the address anymore.
Do you have deleted all the previous info? I guess you must have the wallet info of the previous installation.

[DireWolfM14]

Don't send your seeds to anyone, odds are you will get ripped off.  Don't deal with anyone who sends you a PM about this, odds are they are looking to rip you off.

Was the seed originally created using Electrum?
Do the addresses in the watch only wallet start with a 1, 3, or bc1?  
What about the addresses in the restored wallet, how do they start?

Also, be very careful where you obtain the Electrum software, only download it from electrum.org, and verify the download using the provided PGP signature.

[jackg]

If you have an android phone, try recovering it on there. There's a chance you've written a word down wrong when you meant something else and android electrum won't let you enter non valid words (just in case that's the error)?

Try putting the seeds together also in each order. What does the address begin with also is it a 1, 3 or bc1
 If it's a 3 then you may have made a multisig.

[AB de Royse777]

~snip~
 If it's a 3 then you may have made a multisig.

And if it starts with bc1q then I can confirm that it will be Multisig segwit wallet.

[HCP]

I had written down two seeds but they don't seem to be the ones or to work.

Please define what you mean by this statement?

Do you mean that Electrum indicates they are not valid seeds or do you mean that they are restoring wallets with different addresses/No funds?

[jackg]

~snip~
 If it's a 3 then you may have made a multisig.

And if it starts with bc1q then I can confirm that it will be Multisig segwit wallet.

Mine has a q in it and only one seed? Do you mean native segwit?

[AB de Royse777]

~snip~

Mine has a q in it and only one seed? Do you mean native segwit?

Yeah, native segwit and it's a multiSig wallet with extended seed.

[Dabs]

I haven't seen any native segwit multi-sig wallets ... Usually they still start with 3 and not bc1q. All native addresses start with bc1q.

Sooo. I may have to try this and see, would be awesome to have native segwit multi-sig wallets.

[BitMaxz]

I think he should give more details about his seed phrase if how many words or phrases so that we know if there is missing phrase.

I think BTCrecovery can help to recover his seed maybe if one or more words from the seed is wrong he can use this tool.

@OP
If your seed has mistakes the only thing that I know can recover your seed phrase is to use BTCrecovery just provide the seed phrase and Bitcoin address and let it run to find the right seed phrase.

Try to follow this guide to recover your seed phrase github.com/gurnec/btcrecover/blob/master/docs/Seedrecover_Quick_Start_Guide.md\

I hope that you can update this thread and beware on newbies or untrusted users out there if you receive PM from unknown people and ask for a seed don't share it they most likely a scammer.

[bitmover]

Firat of all, don't respond to any pm. All discussions should be public.

Second: be sure you are not using a fake Electrum. Uninstall yours and download it from electrum.org (the only website)

Insert your seeds and try again.

[dannyboys]

Thanks everyone. The wallet starts with a 16 so does that mean it's a standard wallet.

I guess I had made 2 or 3 wallets. I wrote seeds down for two and possibly a third but that third one is a word short.

I don't have an android unfortunately. I can try BTC recovery. I hope it works.

I'm a bit of a newbie to these kinds of wallets. I guess I messed up.

[nc50lc]

Stupid me uninstalled it to reinstall it and used an uninstaller which cleared out my wallets. I had written down two seeds but they don't seem to be the ones or to work.

So a third-party uninstaller deleted the wallet files which were stored in a separate folder that's not in the same directory of Electrum...
That was a very aggressive or badly written software.

The first step is to check if your wallet was really deleted.

• Hold "Windows key" + "R" -> a "run" dialogue box will open.
• Type %appdata% and press enter -> your appdata folder will open.
• Open "Electrum", then "wallets" folder
• If there are more than one wallet file, open them one-by-one (using Electrum menu file->open) to check if one of them is your old wallet

Just one?
For now, check if all of the word in the two SEEDs are valid (if the "next" button is unclickable)
If the two seeds are valid and restored a different set of addresses, skip these steps and proceed to recover your 3rd seed:

• Go to BIP39 Word list (select a different language if your seed isn't English)
• Press "Ctrl+F" and a "find" dialogue box will open.
• Copy->paste->then enter each of your seed's words (one after another) to check if they belong to the word list.
• Lastly, if there's one that didn't match, try to find the closest word and use that instead and restore the seed to Electrum

Q: Did you created all of your wallets the "normal way"?

[pooya87]

I haven't seen any native segwit multi-sig wallets ... Usually they still start with 3 and not bc1q. All native addresses start with bc1q.

Sooo. I may have to try this and see, would be awesome to have native segwit multi-sig wallets.

this is off topic but to understand how this is trivial you have to think of addresses as the human readable form of pubkey scripts. and they are only defined for certain script types. these scripts contain a hash and use that hash as the input of the encoder.

Base58 -> P2PKH script -> encode HASH160 digest -> address starting with 1 (single signature)
Base58 -> P2SH script -> encode HASH160 digest -> address starting with 3 (script which could be a multi sig one, or any other script)
Bech32 -> P2WPKH script -> encode HASH160 digest -> address starting with bc1 followed by q,w,... indicating witness version and the length indicating the type of the script (shorter ones are P2WPKH since it encodes a HASH160 digest)
bech32 -> P2WSH script -> encode SHA256 digest -> address starting with bc1 followed by q,w,... indicating witness version and the length indicating the type of the script (longer ones are P2WSH since it encodes a SHA256 digest)

[Pmalek]

How well do you understand English? Are all your seeds grammatically correct, there shouldn't be any misspelled words.

I saw a suggestion by someone on this forum a while ago, can't remember who made it.
How did you write down your seed? Maybe you are entering it in the wrong order.

Instead of this

1.word 13. word
2.word 14. word
3.word 15. word
4.word 16. word
5.word 17. word
6.word 18. word
...        ...

Try the following

1.word 2.word 3.word 4.word 5. word 6.word ...
13. word 14. word 15. word 16. word 17. word 18. word

[Abdussamad]

see here for wallet restoration related issues. if this doesn't help then do answer direwolf's questions about where the seeds came from. if they were originally generated by electrum then do tell us the version of electrum or, if you don't remember, the approximate date.

Note to others: when restoring from an electrum seed you don't need to tell it what wallet type you had unless it's a multisig wallet. The seed itself contains enough information about what wallet type you are using. The OP says his addresses begin with 1 so it's a single sig wallet and besides people who create multisig wallets are not the sort to forget they did that.

[NeuroticFish]

Can you please tell us the version number of the Electrum you have now? I really hope it's not the fake 4.0
Also if nothing else works and nobody else makes you a script to check / find your missing work, I can try that Saturday.

Another thing that *may* work would be to try to recover the possibly deleted wallet file. Get (onto another partition or stick) a recovery software like Recuva and see what it finds for you. The file should have been in the folder described by nc50lc already and possibly called default_wallet

[hatshepsut93]

OP, you should try to use some good data recovery software for your platform, is this happened recently and you didn't do much writing to disk, there's a chance you can restore the deleted wallet file. If this doesn't work, you can try to hire professionals to do it, though they will charge a big fee for their service. For now, avoid writing to that disk if you want to try this way of recovering.