Ran a pywallet scan and got a weird result

[morbius55]

So I recovered an old wallet.dat from a hard drive by using recovery software. The wallet is 96kb and I put it on a usb stick and ran a pywallet recovery on it. I knew the passphrase and used it, and the recovery completed fine. The result was strange as it said 0 wallets found 0 encrypted keys, 0 keys decrypted, passphrase correct wallet is decrypted. I then dumped the wallet using pywallet to a txt file but without the passphrase, just to see what it showed. What it showed was encrypted key 96 characters long numbers and letters and salt with a number, and nothing else that looked useful. Would this be of possible use to me? I know the public address that is of interest to me. Thanks if anyone can throw some light on it.

[1715356607]

1715356607

[1715356607]

1715356607

[1715356607]

1715356607

[1715356607]

1715356607

[NotATether]

Theoretically you could try to pass your password into some kind of AES decryption function along with the encrypted key, concatenated with the salt (I don't know of any python script that will do that though), but given that the encrypted key is only 96 characters long, it's possible that decryption will yield only one or two private keys or something like that.

It's very strange that the encrypted key is so small. Does your particular wallet only have one private key in it?

[TheBeardedBaby]

Are you sure it's a bitcoin wallet?

[morbius55]

Are you sure it's a bitcoin wallet?

Yes, definitely a bitcoin wallet.dat but that is all I could recover. Is there a way of getting the WIF  private key from it?

[NotATether]

So I am assuming that the recovered wallet is the one that's 96 KB.

Was part of the wallet file that you attempted to recover from corrupted? Because the only way I can explain 0 private keys being found is if the DB table that stores them in the file was damaged (at least the beginning of it).

Perhaps the encrypted key and salt is the encrypted wallet password and not actually a private key.

[BitDane]

So I am assuming that the recovered wallet is the one that's 96 KB.

Was part of the wallet file that you attempted to recover from corrupted? Because the only way I can explain 0 private keys being found is if the DB table that stores them in the file was damaged (at least the beginning of it).

Perhaps the encrypted key and salt is the encrypted wallet password and not actually a private key.

It is highly possible that the wallet.dat file is already damaged.  There is no 100% assurance that a recovered file is 100% the same as it was unless the drive is untouched after the deletion.  It is also possible that the sector that were once used by the deleted wallet, has been overwritten by another file and mixed up stuff when OP try to recover the file. This is if the HDD is in good condition.

If the file is recovered from a malfunctioning HDD, then it is also possible that some sectors holding that file is damaged resulting to a damage wallet.dat upon recovery.

[whanau]

sounds obvious but have you tried loading the wallet into bitcoin core?