Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Technical Support
Re: Lost Savings Wallet Addresses?!
by
SgtSpike
on 01/06/2011, 18:38:54 UTC
You might try slaving your hard drive to a second computer and using some file recovery software to try to recover the wallet.dat.  Of course, I would advise immediately ceasing use of the computer (just powering it off with the power button would be better than shutting down, lest the wallet file be overwritten by some files that are written during shutdown).  A decent piece of software might cost $50.

If that doesn't work, there are professional labs that will read the actual data on the disk, if it hasn't already been overwritten.  A decent lab would cost $1000 or so.  Don't cheap out on this if you try it.  I did, and I regret it, a lot.

And beyond that, if you use a mechanical hard drive, forensics labs can actually tell what bits were written to a given sector BEFORE the current bits, because the previous bits leave some sort of magnetic bias behind.  That's why military erasing standards dictate that a drive must be overwritten 7 times with random bits before the data that was on it is considered securely erased.  I have no idea what it might cost to get a forensics expert to look at your drive though.