Quote from: p3rplexamous on December 05, 2017, 03:35:45 AM

Hi everyone.

A few years ago I gave my brother BTC for XMAS. He hasnt touched it since and was using Bitcoin QT at the time. We are looking to transfer the funds to a hardware wallet, but when getting him to upload his wallet.dat file, we ran into a snag. It seems he didn't do an actual back up of the wallet app, and instead, had a time machine back up of the computers hard drive made, and when he gained access, we grabbed the wallet.dat file from his bitcoin folder. When loading it into the app on my computer, the funds are coming up as 0. I checked the address on blockchain.info and the funds are still there.

Any suggestions? Can you make a usable backup via dragging and dropping the .dat file as opposed to backing it up manually?

Bitcoin Client Software and Version Number: Bitcoin Core 0.15.1
Operating System: OSX 10.13.1
System Hardware Specs: 2.9 GHz Intel Core i5 with 8 GB 1867 MHz DDR3 and 50 GB free hard drive space.
Description of Problem: Bitcoin Core isnt loading wallet.dat file.

If you don't want to wait for Bitcoin QT to download the the whole blockchain, you have to use a SPV wallet like Electrum.

In Bitcoin-qt:
1. Click 'help' -> 'debug window' -> 'console' tab
2. If you wallet is encrypted, unlock it by typing walletpassphrase "your wallet password" 600
3. Type 'dumpwallet privatekeys.txt ' without the single-quotes.

Wallet keys will then be dumped to privatekeys.txt in readable format.
Create a new wallet in Electrum, and use sweep function to sweep the private keys.