If you lost the wallet, you lost the bitcoin forever, right?

[boinpotter]

I have some bitcoin in a wallet and get it lost (machine reformatted). Does that mean I lost forever ?

[realnowhereman]

Unless you can pull it from the formatted sectors of the disk (if you're going to try, stop using the computer immediately); then yes the coins are lost to you.  It has to be this way -- the private keys stored in your wallet are what give you access to your money.  If it were possible to access your money without those private keys then bitcoin wouldn't be very secure.

I think Casascius has a tool that will search for the signature of the private key in a hard disk image.  Try giving him a poke and asking nicely.

[Gabi]

I have some bitcoin in a wallet and get it lost (machine reformatted). Does that mean I lost forever ?

The wallet contain the private keys you need to be able to use your btc.

You lose the wallet, you lose the keys, and guess what? You lose your btc.

Never heard about backup?  Ppl need to lose money first before discovering why backup is important...

[Fronnk]

There is a program called "Bitcoin wallet recovery" here: http://www.btcnn.com/2011/09/recovering-lost-due-to-format-bitcoin.html

This will probably not work most of the time so be sure to backup your wallet.

[check_status]

Windows formatting does not destroy your HDD data, it destroys the MFT and partition table data which points to where your files are located. As already pointed out, stop using the HDD that contains the data you want to recover.

Recuva is very good at data carving on formatted HDD's. You will need a forensic LiveCD (Hirens) to boot your system from that can run Recuva. Hirens is pretty good because it doesn't alter the HDD data on the disk. Note: You will need a second drive to move files found to.

Good luck.

[Tito91]

Your file wallet.dat contain the private keys you need to be able to use your bitcoin
If u lose it u you will not have access to your Bitcoin wallet