Quote from: bitcoinloser on April 04, 2013, 07:10:23 PM

hi,

two years ago i bought a load of bitcoins and stored them offline,
unencrypted, following the exact process outlined in the original post in this thread.

today i decided to sell them. so i retrieved my wallet.dat file from storage.

then i downloaded the bitcoin client. then i pasted my wallet.dat in the correct place and let it run for 8 hours until it
had synced. it was just about to finish syncing when i got the
error message saying "file corrupt. salvage failed."

then i tried to see if i could upload the file to a blockchain wallet.

i got an error message saying something along the lines of "invalid file
type or incorrect password, no keys uploaded."

so there must be something wrong with my wallet.dat file. but i have no
idea how it became corrupted and what I can do about it to recover my
bitcoins.

i am pretty tech savvy, as far as using windows goes. but when it comes to
playing around in linux and source code, i have no idea. (i use an ubuntu
machine for all my bitcoin work.)

any suggestions would be gratefully appreciated...

You need two things... your wallet.dat AND your private keys. So if you're missing your private keys then you might be out of luck accessing that wallet. Of note, just because a wallet.dat is "unecrypted" doesn't mean that it still doesn't use private keys for access.