Lost wallet? Help me find out

[HCP]

One more question please, could it also be something else? Like Bitcoin Cash? I mean, can those two get confused? If I open it with ElectrumG, will it be BTG 100%?

Definitely not Bitcoin Cash... BCH used either the identical addresses to Bitcoin (as it was, falsely, claiming to be Bitcoin ) or their "cashaddr" format... but it could be another altcoin that also used addresses that start with a "G" and has a fork of the electrum wallet.

I'm not aware of any other altcoins with addresses that start with a "G"... but then, I haven't really looked... the main one I know is BTG.

[Ultegra134]

One more question please, could it also be something else? Like Bitcoin Cash? I mean, can those two get confused? If I open it with ElectrumG, will it be BTG 100%?

Definitely not Bitcoin Cash... BCH used either the identical addresses to Bitcoin (as it was, falsely, claiming to be Bitcoin ) or their "cashaddr" format... but it could be another altcoin that also used addresses that start with a "G" and has a fork of the electrum wallet.

I'm not aware of any other altcoins with addresses that start with a "G"... but then, I haven't really looked... the main one I know is BTG.

I see, not currently at home to download ElectrumG to try it out. Let's suppose I import the file and shows a balance of 5 BTG for instance, I guess it's fine then? I mean, then it's confirmed to be 100% BTG and not something else, right?

[HCP]

Yeah... if it shows a transaction history (not necessarily a positive balance ), then the likelihood of it being something else are about the same chances of randomly typing in a private key and it being to one of Satoshi's old addresses

[Ultegra134]

Yeah... if it shows a transaction history (not necessarily a positive balance ), then the likelihood of it being something else are about the same chances of randomly typing in a private key and it being to one of Satoshi's old addresses

Alrighty, I got news, but not necessarily good. It got me excited at first, at least I had some euphoria feeling for a while. Saw 107 coins, multiply that by $28 each BTG, I was like "I'm rich!"



Well nope, although it appears to be fine, when you try to send to an address, it says that you're using a low fee, despite using the max possible fee you can. The reason for this? It's not a BTG wallet, went through transactions, and they wouldn't appear on the BTG explorer. Googled one of the addresses and found that it was...GARLICOIN, for God's sake I felt so disappointed.

Not even that but also, I tried recovering it by downloading a Garlicoin wallet but couldn't find how to import that wallet file. I mean, it's $2.5 worth of coins, but supposing that one (Nope) day they were worth something more, I could make something out of it.

Thank you very much for your assistance so far!

[HCP]

Maybe try "Garlium": https://xske.github.io/garlium/

It is supposedly an Electrum fork for Garlicoin


Also, I must apologise... I forgot that Electrum stores the wallet history in the wallet file... so that would explain why it could see it all, but didn't actually sync properly or allow you to send. It's when you import private keys that it needs to scan from scratch.

[Ultegra134]

Maybe try "Garlium": https://xske.github.io/garlium/

It is supposedly an Electrum fork for Garlicoin


Also, I must apologise... I forgot that Electrum stores the wallet history in the wallet file... so that would explain why it could see it all, but didn't actually sync properly or allow you to send. It's when you import private keys that it needs to scan from scratch.

No worries mate, I actually opened the wallet file with Garlium, instead of another one I had downloaded from the official Garlicoin website. Works fine, despite the fact that...it has 5 coins only. lol.



I still appreciate your time and effort you put into helping me. I wish we could have actually recovered something of worth, then I would have definitely sent you a reward as an appreciation of your effort.

[HCP]

No worries mate, I actually opened the wallet file with Garlium, instead of another one I had downloaded from the official Garlicoin website. Works fine, despite the fact that...it has 5 coins only. lol.

Yeah... it's like opening my old Byteball/OByte wallet and seeing "thousands of coins" and checking the price and thinking that I've done OK... only to realise the price is actually for a "GByte"... and I'm looking at the Byte value! 

I still appreciate your time and effort you put into helping me. I wish we could have actually recovered something of worth, then I would have definitely sent you a reward as an appreciation of your effort.

All good... always happy to help (or try to anyway )... generally end up learning something new along the way!

[Ultegra134]

Hello there,
Wasn't intending to unbury such an old thread, but since I've already created one in the past for the exact same issue, I decided not to open a new one. A few days ago, I stumbled on a few HDDs when clearing up old cabinets, along with my long-lost external HDD case and decided to have a quick look at one of the drives, which could have possibly had a wallet in the past.

Hooked up my drive, everything was running smoothly, didn't find anything interesting related with cryptocurrencies, so I decided to run Recuva.


After an hour or two of scanning, I found and restored two "default_wallet" files and one BitGo keycard, which I'm in the process of recovering the account. First and foremost, though, I wanted to fiddle with these two wallet files, which appear identical. Recuva is claiming that there were no overwritten sectors and the file appears in excellent condition, I have my doubts.

Thanks to HCP and the previous posters, I downloaded Hexinator again and tried reviewing the file, however, it looks corrupt to me. Can someone more experienced confirm, and if it is, can anything be done to restore it?

[Ultegra134]

Thanks to HCP and the previous posters, I downloaded Hexinator again and tried reviewing the file, however, it looks corrupt to me. Can someone more experienced confirm, and if it is, can anything be done to restore it?

Looking at the name of file, most likely it's wallet file for Electrum (and it's forks). Newer Electrum encrypt everything by default, so it's hard to guess whether is corrupted or not. I know Electrum has magic bytes to identify what kind of encryption is used[1], but unfortunately i don't where Electrum store it's magic bytes.

[1] https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/blob/6650e6bbae12a79e12667857ee039f1b1f30c7e3/electrum/storage.py#L135-L145

Thank you for your response, I hadn't thought myself that it was possibly encrypted, however, I'm prepared for the worst case scenario, thus, I'm not getting my hopes up nor am I excited. I'm suspecting a wallet which did have a small balance inside, it could be this one. Unfortunately, I tried setting up Electrum and using the specific wallet file but it failed to open it.

[Ultegra134]

Looking at the name of file, most likely it's wallet file for Electrum (and it's forks). Newer Electrum encrypt everything by default, so it's hard to guess whether is corrupted or not. I know Electrum has magic bytes to identify what kind of encryption is used[1], but unfortunately i don't where Electrum store it's magic bytes.

[1] https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/blob/6650e6bbae12a79e12667857ee039f1b1f30c7e3/electrum/storage.py#L135-L145

Thank you for your response, I hadn't thought myself that it was possibly encrypted, however, I'm prepared for the worst case scenario, thus, I'm not getting my hopes up nor am I excited. I'm suspecting a wallet which did have a small balance inside, it could be this one.

At least make sure you backup the wallet file and all relevant information (e.g. hint of the password, when it's created). You also might want to make a raw copy of your HDD. It's possible you could find way to restore it in the future.

Unfortunately, I tried setting up Electrum and using the specific wallet file but it failed to open it.

What exactly do you mean by failed to open? You don't know the password? Electrum say it's corrupted/other error message?

I'm trying to load the file, but Electrum freezes for approximately 2-3 minutes. Tried both wallet files, but the same thing occurs. It stops responding, shortly after an error message appears claiming that it has failed to read the file. Is there any chance that it would be a different kind of wallet, such as Ethereum for instance, and hence the reason it's not reading it?

On the other hand, chances are that it's simply corrupt.

Edit: Just recovered the BitGo wallet, it's empty

[Cricktor]

Not sure if any old Electrum version encrypted its wallet file as binary (non-ASCII) gibberish. More recent Electrum encrypted wallets are completely ASCII printable gibberish, your Hexinator screenshot looks completely different from that.

[pooya87]

Not sure if any old Electrum version encrypted its wallet file as binary (non-ASCII) gibberish. More recent Electrum encrypted wallets are completely ASCII printable gibberish, your Hexinator screenshot looks completely different from that.

Earlier versions (I believe pre 3.0) didn't encrypt the whole file and only the secrets but they've always used AES which would return a byte array (each value would be between 0 to 255) hence the result on disk would always be gibberish and not ASCII.