How can I tell what version an old bitcoin wallet is ?

[cyptomania]

I have an older wallet but it won't load up,"Wallet loading failed error loading" says it's corrupted which it might be but found a few threads where people just loaded the older wallet into an older bitcoin version and everything worked fine.

My question is how to tell what version the wallet it is if it won't load ?

[bob123]

Are you talking about a bitcoin core wallet (file ending is .dat) ?
Bitcoin core is backwards compatible, so you shouldn't have any problems loading the wallet file.

Before trying anything, please make sure to have several backups.

Where did you get the file from? Did you buy it? If so, you got scammed.
Every single seller of wallet files is a scammer who sells manipulated files deceiving the buyer. If this is the case, the wallet file does not contain any private keys to any coins you believe there might be.

[cyptomania]

Hi,no it's mine I posted back a few months that I found all my old wallets on my old Thinkpad and some hand written private keys,all kinds of stuff,I figured out everything and I'm running a few partial keys in Finderouter,my old wallets had nothing in them but dust but this one won't load up,I'm more curious than anything it probably has nothing in it.

[BitMaxz]

How about the file extension?
Do you have any idea if when did you create this wallet?

If you are using Windows OS try to check the file using right-click and then properties and maybe you can find something useful under details like date or when it was modified.

We will find some wallet that was created before with that date as our reference.

If the file has a .dat extension it might a bitcoin core wallet but if it doesn't have any extension it might be for Electrum wallet.
Adding more details about the file will give us an idea of which wallet support this file.

[nc50lc]

I have an older wallet but it won't load up,"Wallet loading failed error loading" says it's corrupted which it might be -snip-

Bitcoin Core will also display a similar error if you've loaded it with a different wallet file but AFAIK, it will try to salvage it if there's enough valid data in it.

Anyways, for Bitcoin core's wallet.dat, using "salvagewallet" is still better when trying to fix a corrupted wallet.dat.
To use it, launch bitcoin-qt with -salvagewallet as an additional start parameter.

Example for Windows: create a shortcut of bitcoin-qt and add -salvagewallet to the "Target".

Code:

"C:\Program Files\Bitcoin\bitcoin-qt.exe" -salvagewallet

Then use that shortcut to use Bitcoin core with salvagewallet.

Note: After using the shortcut, there will be a backup of your wallet.dat in the same dir as your wallet.dat, but it's best to keep your own backup.

[HCP]

My question is how to tell what version the wallet it is if it won't load ?

There are "version" numbers in wallet.dat's... but they don't really relate to actual versions of Bitcoin Core... more to "feature sets" that are implemented in that particular version of the wallet. For example, things like encryption, compressed keys, HD wallet etc.


They were originally included in the wallet.h source code, but are now in walletutil.h: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/4a540683ec40393d6369da1a9e02e45614db936d/src/wallet/walletutil.h#L14