Post
Topic
Board Electrum
Re: 1 BTC Reward / Electrum.dat password recovery (have seed)
by
Borisz
on 15/10/2017, 07:56:03 UTC
Hello,

I am joining to the others and am fairly confident that btcrecover can help you. If you indeed have an idea of what the password might be then you want a token file. This is nicely explained on https://github.com/gurnec/btcrecover/blob/master/TUTORIAL.md#the-token-file.

If, however, you do not want to go the route as mentioned by HCP and give a part of your wallet file to anyone to have a go at it, then you have to do it on your own.

I would approach it in the following way
Step 1.
Write down everything about the password on a sheet of paper. For example: contained full words, any special characters, where could these be roughly, did it start or end with a special character/phrase or word. Also quite important, how long was the password? The exact length is ideal, otherwise you have to do more iterations and more preparation in step 3. If you know the password had the word "cat" in it, but was 30 characters long, well...good luck. If you combined 2-3-4 "standrad passwords" that you use, but don't remember exactly the order or if anything was capitalized, maybe a few special symbols, then your chances are vastly improved.
Step 2.
Create a copy of your wallet file and work with that. Always keep a copy somewhere safe.
Step 3.
Head over to the tutorial linked above and see what you need. Since it is well explained there and I have no information on your password, I cannot help you with anything specific, but you definitely want to look at a "token file".
Btcrecover can mix and match whole words that you know for sure appear in the password; even if you don't know if you capitalized it or it was at the end of beginning.
The remainder of the password where you have no info has to be filled out with wildcards. A clever use of these, e.g. if you know that it was all lower case or all numerical, can also greatly imporve your chances.
You have to spend most of your time on this part where you have to cleverly assemble the input parameters to tell the software what to do later. With well-defined parameters you can be relaxed that running btcrecover for x minutes/hours/days was not a waste of time and you will get something at the end.
Step 4.
Start crunching with btcrecover. This is also well explained in the guide and again without knowing anything about your password and possible hardware, not much can be helped.
If you have indeed "an idea of what the password might be" and fairly decent hardware for number crucnhing, your chances are good.

Good luck!