Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Technical Support
Topic OP
Need help getting private keys from a corrupted wallet
by
asciicat
on 18/11/2013, 20:02:45 UTC
So, a year+ ago, I reformated my computer and the one thing I forgot to backup was my bitcoins. After I reinstalled windows I remembered "MY BITCOINS!". I held power and turned my comp off, booted into a separate hard drive, and used a recovery program (recuva) to get the wallet.dat file.

But of course, when I ran bitcoin with the recovered wallet, it failed instantly on startup. "wallet corrupt - salvage failed"

Here's what happens with pywallet:
Code:
<~/Documents/Backup/bitcoins>python pywallet.py wallet.dat --dumpwallet
'ecdsa' package is not installed, pywallet won't be able to sign/verify messages
ERROR:root:Couldn't open wallet.dat/main. Try quitting Bitcoin and running this again.
Here's what happens with bitcointools:
Code:
<~/Documents/Backup/bitcoins/bitcointools>python dbdump.py --wallet
ERROR:root:Couldn't open wallet.dat/main. Try quitting Bitcoin and running this again.

Bitcoin is not running - I just restarted my computer.

I am offering a bounty to anyone who can help me recover these.

Thanks in advance.