Wallet disappeared?!

[siliconnexion]

Hi all,

unfortunately I acquired the "disk checker" virus a few days ago, which borked windows pretty hard. I fired up bitcoin yesterday, downloaded the block chain and I have no bitcoins, old transactions or addresses. It's completely empty. Checked the bitcoin directory in appdata and all files (including wallet.dat) in there were only recently created. It looks like my old wallet.dat was somehow overwritten or deleted (( I tried using "Handy Recovery 5" and could find no deleted or older versions of wallet.dat.

I checked the address the coins were sent to from Virwox on block explorer and it doesn't look like they've been stolen either..

Can anyone provide any insight on how I could recover the coins, or am I screwed? 

[1714952016]

1714952016

[1714952016]

1714952016

[1714952016]

1714952016

[1714952016]

1714952016

[payb.tc]

step one, stop using that hard drive immediately.

step two, casascius had good luck recovering someone's wallet using a programmed called 'winhex' i believe, to search for private keys.

[paraipan]

any backups ?

[siliconnexion]

OK thanks, i searched for my public key in WinHex and found it in the current wallet.dat, so I guess it is corrupted and not overwritten. Whew. I see there are tools for linux to recover the private keys; is there a similar way to read the .dat on windows? My wallet was unencrypted so hopefully that makes things easier.

[Mellivora]

I hope you recover your coins.

On a side note, is there an estimate of how many coins have been "lost" by all users?  Over the years, there has to be a significant amount.  Just curious.

[DeathAndTaxes]

I hope you recover your coins.

On a side note, is there an estimate of how many coins have been "lost" by all users?  Over the years, there has to be a significant amount.  Just curious.

Impossible to estimate.  The only thing you can know is how long it has been since a coin has been used. 

[payb.tc]

I hope you recover your coins.

On a side note, is there an estimate of how many coins have been "lost" by all users?  Over the years, there has to be a significant amount.  Just curious.

Impossible to estimate.  The only thing you can know is how long it has been since a coin has been used.  

there was a list somewhere on this forum... i remember it being around 20,000 btc of known lost coins but that was quite a few months ago.

[tlhonmey]

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=25091.0


Currently there is no Windows version, but then you really don't want to be booting off the drive in question anyway, and my personal experience with windows CDs is that they tend to be flaky.  A linux live CD is easy enough to get if you have another computer and internet access.  Personally I used Mint Debian from linuxmint.com.


The post does a pretty good job of walking you through the steps, but I can clarify any of them that leave you with questions.  The program the thread is about will snatch anything and everything that looks like a bitcoin key off of the drive in question, so as long as they're still there and your wallet wasn't encrypted you should be able to get them all back.

[kevinmark]

Is there any estimation of the lost coins or not?