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Topic: Bitcoins in corrupted wallet.dat with transactions shown? (Read 665 times)

newbie
Activity: 8
Merit: 0
Yes, I have bitcoin core and I see the balance in blockchain.info.  No, I havent used nearly that many addresses.  Good point.
Incidentally, the problem happened when I had to restore a backup from a corrupted version of Windows 7 which I still have on the drive but cannot load, even in safe mode. (BSOD) I didn't delete a wallet, so I feel as though a recovery is possible.  I don't know if I did the hex editor search correctly, but I found nothing at all related to the private keys.

So, what I may need is a way to recover a key from this former install of Windows.  A free recovery tool did not find any wallet.dat files deleted.
legendary
Activity: 3290
Merit: 16489
Thick-Skinned Gang Leader and Golden Feather 2021
The problem seems to be that the wallet from my old installation of Windows HAS A LAST MODIFIED DATE THAT IS OLDER than the transactions which funded the wallet address in question. Since the backup of the wallet seems to be prior to receiving the BTC, is this why I have no key for this address?
It depends: before HD-wallets, Bitcoin Core used a keypool, which by default stored 100 addresses. Any backup you made, should have the same 100 addresses. When you ran out of addresses, new addresses would be created, but your backup wouldn't know them.
If you deleted your wallet and restored an older backup, it might not have all your private keys. In that case it's impossible to restore.
Did you receive payments to 100+ addresses before this transfer?

Have you written down the seed of your wallet somewhere? Would be much easier to just recover everything using that.

Also, i'm assuming you're using Bitcoin Core?
Bitcoin Core doesn't have a "seed".
legendary
Activity: 1946
Merit: 1427
Here's the deal.  I haven't been able to dump private key for any version of the wallet.dat that I have.  The problem seems to be that the wallet from my old installation of Windows HAS A LAST MODIFIED DATE THAT IS OLDER than the transactions which funded the wallet address in question. Since the backup of the wallet seems to be prior to receiving the BTC, is this why I have no key for this address?  AND WHAT DO I DO ABOUT IT? I'm desperately looking to recover a wallet file (if it exists) from my drive using recovery software.

Have you written down the seed of your wallet somewhere? Would be much easier to just recover everything using that.

Also, i'm assuming you're using Bitcoin Core?
newbie
Activity: 8
Merit: 0
Here's the deal.  I haven't been able to dump private key for any version of the wallet.dat that I have.  The problem seems to be that the wallet from my old installation of Windows HAS A LAST MODIFIED DATE THAT IS OLDER than the transactions which funded the wallet address in question. Since the backup of the wallet seems to be prior to receiving the BTC, is this why I have no key for this address?  AND WHAT DO I DO ABOUT IT? I've also tried using a hex editor to retrieve the key.
newbie
Activity: 8
Merit: 0
Thanks for the response.  I am halfway thru a looooong reindex and will post the debug log once this is through, because I am not expecting this to work  Angry
staff
Activity: 3458
Merit: 6793
Just writing some code
The transactions don't matter; what matters are the private keys. The transactions can always be recovered as they are in the blockchain, but your private keys cannot be recovered if you lose them. If you check block explorers for all of the addresses in your wallet and don't see any suspicious transactions, then you are fine and your coins are not stolen.

If you have a backup of your wallet file, then use that with your new install of Bitcoin Core and see if it works. If it does not, then please post the debug.log file. Don't use salvagewallet since it may actually make the problem worse (salvagewallet has been known to corrupt uncorrupted wallets. It is a last resort thing).
newbie
Activity: 8
Merit: 0
I recently checked block explorer for my address and it shows the balance expected and no outgoing transactions. The incoming transactions from when I transferred from Coinbase to Bitcoin Core in 2014 are showing in BC.  The balance shows 0 since I formatted a new version of Windows and replaced wallet.dat with a backup.  

Since reindex took weeks on this computer, I loaded BC on laptop which gave "corrupted wallet.dat", which is the first ive seen that.  I tried to reindex and salvagewallet again on that cpu, but no dice.  I don't really understand pywallet, but I have a "BTCtransactions" file in there which show my incoming transactions.

Can anyone verify that I haven't been hacked on my unencrypted wallet, or otherwise shed some light on how I can fix this wallet file? Cry
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