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Topic: Bitcoin-qt Passphrase stopped working after clone/ghost of hard drive (Read 2170 times)

hero member
Activity: 569
Merit: 500
I have near the same problem, is there any solution ?

I recovered my wallet with pywallet but can not send bitcoins because bitcoin qt says my passphrase is wrong

Here are my two posts with my issue


https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.9271649    Re: Pywallet 2.2: manage your wallet [Update required]


First time i thought the problem is connected to Armory , but now i do not know
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.9263763
hero member
Activity: 672
Merit: 504
a.k.a. gurnec on GitHub
Thank you so much for your response. The answer to all those is no. I did update my bitcoin-qt, just to see if it would fix it.

im on windows and trying your suggestion. i downloaded the zip and python and am running the script in elevated cmd and this is what im getting:

"The wallet is encrypted and the passphrase is incorrect"

Should i just give up?

perhaps a stupid question.. but when you open the bitcoin client you have the exact same RX addresses, right ?

Justin00 had a good question, but assuming the answer is Yes, I'm thinking it's not worth the effort trying other things if you don't have much in that wallet. It'd be possible to check for single-bit or single-byte errors in the mkey for example, but someone would have to write some custom software to do that which wouldn't be that easy...
legendary
Activity: 910
Merit: 1000
★YoBit.Net★ 350+ Coins Exchange & Dice
perhaps a stupid question.. but when you open the bitcoin client you have the exact same RX addresses, right ?
newbie
Activity: 3
Merit: 0
Thank you so much for your response. The answer to all those is no. I did update my bitcoin-qt, just to see if it would fix it.

im on windows and trying your suggestion. i downloaded the zip and python and am running the script in elevated cmd and this is what im getting:

"The wallet is encrypted and the passphrase is incorrect"

Should i just give up?






hero member
Activity: 672
Merit: 504
a.k.a. gurnec on GitHub
Sure sounds mysterious to me...

You mentioned cloning your drive. Did you need to:

  Reinstall the OS?
  Reinstall Bitcoin-Qt?

Do you have an older backup of your wallet file?

Have you made any other recent changes (other than the HD upgrade) to your PC?

Does your passphrase contain any non-ASCII characters (any characters not in this table: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII#ASCII_printable_code_chart)?

If the answer is no to all of those questions, I'd probably try dumping your wallet file with pywallet which might provide some clues.

You can download it from here: https://github.com/jackjack-jj/pywallet/archive/master.zip If you're on Windows, you'll also need Python 2.7 from here: https://www.python.org/download/ (you don't need any other libraries, despite what the README for pywallet says)

Next run it from the command line, something along these lines* (after you unzip the pywallet-master.zip file somewhere):

Code:
C:\python27\python C:\Downloads\pywallet-master\pywallet.py --dumpwallet --passphrase="the passphrase" > wallet-dumped.txt

If any of the private or public keys in your wallet file are corrupted, Bitcoin-Qt will complain about a bad password, but pywallet only checks the first key it finds. In the dump file, check for a message that says "The wallet is encrypted and the passphrase is correct" or "is incorrect". If correct, you probably have a single corrupted key which could be found and removed. If incorrect, then it could be your master key that's corrupted, or the password actually has changed, which might not be repairable....

* If you're paranoid like me, the output file should be something like " > e:\wallet-dumped.txt" where e: is a disposable thumb drive which you can later destroy. One thing about SSDs is that there's usually no good way to securely delete a file from them, and the dump file will contain all your unencrypted keys... if you have a hard disk drive, you could use Microsoft's SDelete (Google for it...).
newbie
Activity: 3
Merit: 0
I see a lot of posts about people forgetting their passphrase...but.... for me, i have used it daily for the past year, and it stopped working today! I tried with multiple keyboards, i tried typing it in word and pasting it. NO GO! Here is what happened...

I ghosted(cloned) my hard drive to a new solid state drive. everything is an exact copy, and everything works perfect.....other than my passphrase in my bitcoin-qt wallet doesn't work now. im not stressing out because i have been keeping it cleaned out on a daily basis into my Coinbase account and just using this for mining. I dont have much in it but i would still like some answers. i already formatted and sold my old drive so i cant put it back in for testing. Everything is there, coins, addresses, transaction history, but the passphrase that i have been using every day, and is the same as all my other passphrase's isnt working with my bitcoin wallet.

What would cause this? It is so crazy.

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