Electrum wallet on corrupted SSD. Seed restore not working.

[larry_vw_1955]

If you can't restore the seed: how "corrupted" is the SSD? Any chance you can still read data from it? Create a disk image first, then mount it from a different OS for instance? Maybe you can still recover the wallet.

if he remembers the wallets password, assuming it was encrypted then maybe that could work but then again, the ssd might be in bad shape but there's always data recovery companies willing to help out if it makes financial sense for the ssd owner. not sure how succesful those type of recovery attempts are though but if he plans on going that route, he probably shouldn't be playing around with the drive himself...

[Cricktor]

When I enter my seed phrase (that came from electrum) while trying to restore the "next" button is greyed out. When I change to BIP39 the checksum passes. After clicking "detect existing accounts" I get no existing accounts found. I have also tried restoring with the legacy / p2sh-segwit / native segwit.

I am at a loss and after scanning forums for days I am pretty much hopeless  . Do you fine people have any suggestions?

I would assume that you have a badly documented mnemonic seed phrase because some of your details just don't go well together.

Electrum itself doesn't generate a BIP39 compatible mnemonic seed phrase and I find it highly unlikely that a possibly wrong or mixed up sequence of an Electrum mnemonic seed would pass a BIP39 checksum test by chance. I have to assume you're sure about the correct sequence of your mnemonic seed words.

I.e. your mnemonic seed has very likely been created by some other BIP39 compatible wallet or mnemonic seed words generator. So, apparently your documentation for your mnemonic seed is flawed. This may also leave the possibility open that you might have used an optional mnemonic seed passphrase (which shouldn't be written down together with the mnemonic seed words for obvious reasons).

Next already mentioned issue could be some non-standard derivation path on top of all (which would have needed proper documentation, too). If you remember which wallet software generated your BIP39 mnemonic seed words then the information provided at https://walletsrecovery.org/ may help to pinpoint the likely used derivation path of your wallet.

I'm emphasizing the necessity of good and complete documentation of such important wallet restauration details (by no means a complete list: when created, for what reason, which wallet software name and version, number and order of words, optional passphrase used?, derivation path) because a lot of wallet restauration issues show some lack of it. I highly recommend to test a wallet recovery on a secure computer while the wallet is still accessible.

HD-wallet gap limit issues could also prevent the proper automatic detection of your derivation path.

[o_e_l_e_o]

I find it highly unlikely that a possibly wrong or mixed up sequence of an Electrum mnemonic seed would pass a BIP39 checksum test by chance.

There would be a 1/16 chance. So just unlikely, but not highly unlikely.

[Cricktor]

I'm not good at combinatory math or statistics (or basically too lazy for it). My thinking was that for a 12-word mnemonic seed there's only those 4 bits left for the checksum (4 bits imply this 1/16 chance), but the last word contains both bits that influence the binary seed hash which contributes in part to the checksum bits, so it's not independant from each other (at least I only know this for a BIP39 mnemonic seed, not sure how Electrum encodes its seed details into the Electrum mnemonic seed).

I admit I haven't checked this mathematically nor by experiment, but still I'd assume (and may be totally wrong) it unlikely that, as the OP implied, an Electrum mnemonic seed would pass a BIP39 checksum test (by 1/16 chance). Just my gutt fealing, I'm not insisting on it.

[nc50lc]

-snip-
I admit I haven't checked this mathematically nor by experiment, but still I'd assume (and may be totally wrong) it unlikely that, as the OP implied, an Electrum mnemonic seed would pass a BIP39 checksum test (by 1/16 chance). Just my gutt fealing, I'm not insisting on it.

Yes, it's possible.
Although Electrum's "seed version system" is different from BIP39's checksum, both are using the same wordlist when generating mnemonics.
So an Electrum seed has that chance to be a valid BIP39 seed.
(electrum doesn't rely on a fixed word list to create a seed but currently uses the same word list as BIP39's)

However, if he used v4.1.3 or later versions of Electrum to create the wallet, there's no chance that it'll also be a valid BIP39 seed because they excluded such results when generating seed phrases.
https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/pull/6001

[o_e_l_e_o]

IMy thinking was that for a 12-word mnemonic seed there's only those 4 bits left for the checksum (4 bits imply this 1/16 chance), but the last word contains both bits that influence the binary seed hash which contributes in part to the checksum bits, so it's not independant from each other (at least I only know this for a BIP39 mnemonic seed, not sure how Electrum encodes its seed details into the Electrum mnemonic seed).

Electrum seed phrases are different as explained by the link nc50lc shared above.

You can read our discussion on the previous page of this topic as to why it would still be a 1/16 chance of generating a valid BIP39 seed phrase. Yes, the last word contains 7 bits of entropy in addition to 4 bits of checksum (and so they are not independent as your correctly point out), but whatever the resulting checksum turns out to be, there will always be a 1/16 chance on average that it matches whatever the last 4 bits of the final word are.

SomberNight (Electrum dev) actually says this too in the second link nc50lc has shared above:

Currently there is an approx 1/16 chance that newly generated seeds have a valid bip39 checksum (and hence are both valid electrum seeds and bip39 seeds at the same time).