Solved: Multibit 0.4.4 not loading wallet files, but maybe magnet link bug

[stochastic]

I have an encrypted volume that when mounted is loaded to the symlink where multibit looks for the wallet.dat files.  It worked perfectly fine earlier today but now it fails to open my other .dat files that I have.  It only will load the multibit.dat file and skips the others.  When I remove this file multibit crashes.

Has anyone had this problem?

I am using Multibit version 0.4.4

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[stochastic]

It did not seem to be a symlink problem as I did not open Multibit before mounting the encrypted drive.  To fix the problem I just re-opened each of the wallet files through Multibit.

The problem might have been from the bitcoin magnet links.  I was testing out my own earlier in the day and after I closed Multibit it would not load the rest of the wallet files.

[jim618]

A possible cause of what you are seeing.

How the bitcoin URI code works is that when you click on a link:

1) The OS starts up a multibit instance with the required bitcoin uri as a parameter.
2) As only one copy of multibit runs per machine (see below) the new instance of multibit checks if there is another multibit instance open and, if there is, passes the parameter to that instance and then shuts down. This is done over a socket.
3) The existing instance then deals with the bitcoin URI.

It is possible that in your URI testing you got a copy of multibit running in the background which would give similiar symptoms to what you were experiencing. If you close down any copy of multibit running and look in Task Manager: if there is a java instance running with about 100 MB of memory space running that is most likely a 'lurking' MultiBit. Just kill it.


The reason only one copy of MultiBit runs at a time is that it is frequently writing to your wallets when you get new transactions etc. To avoid nasty filelocking bugs it is simpler to enforce only a single instance running.

[stochastic]

A possible cause of what you are seeing.

How the bitcoin URI code works is that when you click on a link:

1) The OS starts up a multibit instance with the required bitcoin uri as a parameter.
2) As only one copy of multibit runs per machine (see below) the new instance of multibit checks if there is another multibit instance open and, if there is, passes the parameter to that instance and then shuts down. This is done over a socket.
3) The existing instance then deals with the bitcoin URI.

It is possible that in your URI testing you got a copy of multibit running in the background which would give similiar symptoms to what you were experiencing. If you close down any copy of multibit running and look in Task Manager: if there is a java instance running with about 100 MB of memory space running that is most likely a 'lurking' MultiBit. Just kill it.


The reason only one copy of MultiBit runs at a time is that it is frequently writing to your wallets when you get new transactions etc. To avoid nasty filelocking bugs it is simpler to enforce only a single instance running.

Yea I think is what most likely happened.  Thanks for the explanation.