Update won't recognise seed

[Blowout]

sorry, i meant i downloaded from "The Electrum.org" site, im careful not to get caught by phishing sites etc

I did a fresh o/s install of Catalina and the new electrum works as it should , I've made a couple of new wallets and they appear to work fine. Ive sent and received btc this evening with ease and success.

Its quite possible that electrum doesn't like the latest Catalina but as i say it functions seamlessly at the moment without issue.

Im just hoping now that the deep scan on the drive will produce the previous files from the old Electrum folders and hopefully i can extract the data i need from that.

I have a terrible feeling that the seed i have is one from another wallet and not an electrum wallet seed at all as i have several and may have muddled them up..!

i do have an electronic document with loads of seeds and keys and passwords but as you can guess its on the H/D and im hoping i can recover it!

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[Abdussamad]

the only electrum site is electrum.org not theelectrum.org.

take a look at this faq regarding wallet restoration. try the things listed there depending on whether wallet restoration is successful or not.

[Lucius]

I have a terrible feeling that the seed i have is one from another wallet and not an electrum wallet seed at all as i have several and may have muddled them up..!

i do have an electronic document with loads of seeds and keys and passwords but as you can guess its on the H/D and im hoping i can recover it!

Then what you stated is probably the cause of your problems, and the problem you have comes from the fact that you mixed key data with which you need to be extremely careful. Another big mistake is that you kept that information on your hard drive, and in a particular case, as you can see, is not a smart move. Also, if the document was not encrypted, you were exposed to possible hacking, not only from online threats, but also from anyone with access to a computer. Good luck with recovery.

@HCP it's probably out of scope but there could be a chance a clipbload virus changed the seed or a chance of something else happening (i.e an old version of the wallet with some vulnerabilities or something)...

Clipboard malware can only change the coin address, where did you get the idea that it could change seed and what would be the benefit of it for whoever would do it?

I only set this up less than a year ago.

A year ago he could only download version 3.3.4 which is released February 13, 2019, and that version is safe almost as latest 3.3.8.

[jackg]

@HCP it's probably out of scope but there could be a chance a clipbload virus changed the seed or a chance of something else happening (i.e an old version of the wallet with some vulnerabilities or something)...

Clipboard malware can only change the coin address, where did you get the idea that it could change seed and what would be the benefit of it for whoever would do it?

Yeah I forgot there was a confirmation screen so the clipboard virus would probably do nothing...

It's more likely the seed is somewhere in those words instead now. I'm not sure if there are any validation tools that can check the accuracy of a seed but it might be possible to edit electrums code to do it, have you got the words well spaced? Are they all line separated and all 12 words?

[jackg]

Do you know your address or the first three letters? I can try to write up some script for woking out whether it's an accepted mnemonic or not but it might be difficult due to an (over)use of packages on electrum's side.

[Blowout]

Hi, when you say " Address" do you mean wallet address ? If so then yes i do.

Regards

[jackg]

Hi, when you say " Address" do you mean wallet address ? If so then yes i do.

Regards

Yeah it'll begin bc1, 3 or 1

[Lucius]

Yeah I forgot there was a confirmation screen so the clipboard virus would probably do nothing...

Writing things that do not make sense is not something that an "experienced member" should forgot, and clipboard virus affecting seed is completely meaningless...

Do you know your address or the first three letters? I can try to write up some script for woking out whether it's an accepted mnemonic or not but it might be difficult due to an (over)use of packages on electrum's side.

You still not get it? Why you want to check is seed good (correct one) or bad (wrong one), when the OP himself admitted that he had mixed it up with other seeds which are stored on his hard drive? Easy solution is to use that seed on some other device if there is some conflict on first device. If seed is correct then it should recover OP wallet/s, if not, he is using wrong seed or he is maybe add extra word to seed in time of wallet creation.


jackg, we also have post edit option, there is no need to post in a row, and it is against rules.

[Blowout]

Hi,
      The first few characters of wallet are 3L6TKS. if that's any help

Regards

[BitMaxz]

Hi,
      The first few characters of wallet are 3L6TKS. if that's any help

Regards

It seems that you created P2SH segwit wallet on Electrum that starts with "3" as address prefix.

If that's the case you need to enable BIP39 when you are pasting your seedphrase as HCP suggested on the first page of this thread.

Have you already tried to enable the BIP39? If it still not recognize well your problem is you saved a wrong seed phrase.

I think you can try to use the BTCrecovery to recovery the exact seed phrase. But I don't if it supports the latest version of Electrum.

[HCP]

The first few characters of wallet are 3L6TKS. if that's any help

Electrum only creates "3" type addresses if you:

a. Create a 'MultiSignature' wallet
b. Create a '2FA' wallet that uses the TrustedCoin functionality
c. Use the "Options -> BIP39 seed" option when entering a seed and then select the "p2sh-segwit (p2wpkh-p2sh)" option:



So, try option C and see if Electrum recreates your wallet.

[Blowout]

Thanks for all the suggestions, im sure that when i first used Electrum that those options weren't given. Are they new? i created it about a year ago.

If that's the case then i suppose it makes things a little more cryptic. Hoping the HD recovery yields some results.

thanks to all for the advice.

[Lucius]

Blowout, Electrum is support Segwit from version 3.0 which is dated to November 1st, 2017, so I doubt your problem is that the seed was created with a very old version, although you may have download an older version for some reason, can you remember whether it was version 3.0 or higher?

Did you try to recover your wallet with Electrum mobile (Android)?

I have a terrible feeling that the seed i have is one from another wallet and not an electrum wallet seed at all as i have several and may have muddled them up..!
i do have an electronic document with loads of seeds and keys and passwords but as you can guess its on the H/D and im hoping i can recover it!

I still think that what you post above is main reason of your problem, and that seed you are using may be from some other wallet, or you mixed up words in some way and you forgot about it. Try to focus on hard disc recovery.

[Blowout]

i concour with you wholly  , im focussing on recovering all data from HD, but as you can guess i can recover almost every file i can remember but the Electrum folder and associated files are refusing to rear their ugly heads. is it common for the electrum app and folder to reside on the desktop?

[jackg]

Is it common for the electrum app and folder to reside on the desktop?

That depends on quite a few diddferent things. If you used a standalone electrum (like I use) then you can put it and its data in any folder you want.

If you've sent funds from your address already it would be possible to work out whether it is multisig (legacy) or if it is segwit (I'm not sure which is more likely at this stage).

If you put the address into btc.com/<youraddress> (omitting the <>) then you should be able to see the transactions in the address, click on an outgoing transaction and scroll down to near the bottom, if it says something like P2SH MULTISIG (3 of 4) then it's a multisig, if it doesn't - it'll be segwit.

[Abdussamad]

the location of the wallet file for standalone and windows installer versions is given below: http://docs.electrum.org/en/latest/faq.html#where-is-my-wallet-file-located

for portable version the wallet file is in a subdirectory of the same directory as the electrum executable. that directory is named electrum_data.

so it depends on what version of electrum you have. check your browser history for the download URL and compare it to the links on the download page: https://electrum.org/#download

[Blowout]

I want to thank all those who commented and gave me suggestions on how to resolve my problem 9electrum not recognising the seed).
I i finally restored lost data from my HD and was able to piece together the original seed. Once the wallet had been rebuilt the seed which was not compromised or corrupted flawlessly opened up / restored the wallet. I now have full access to my funds albeit 15% devalued since last week.

Once again thank you all for your support.