Topic: Early Bitcoin Wallet - Help Needed - Advice Appreciated - page 4. (Read 1831 times)

Yeah nice. That's definitely doable. 20 minute train ride. 4.9 stars & 260 reviews. Not bad at all. 😁

The data recovery company is www.payam.com.au

They specialise in recovering data from busted drives. I'd use them as a last resort for you original external drive, if you are unsuccessful in recovering the wallet data from your other copied drives.
 

Thanks for the info. Intend on getting absolutely everything I've got togeather then putting the whole lot on one drive. Once complete doing a search on the whole lot in one hit.

Plan on using the new computer dude for everything. Not waiting till Xmas for the external hard drive hunt either. Got that organised for Sunday.

Also plan on buying a new laptop aswell in the next couple of days so I've got one that's "air gapped" so if there any clowns reading all this intending on doing something strange I've got that covered.

Still don't really know what I'm doing so still researching & just going with what's seems logical. No real computer use since 2012 when half decent smart phones could do most of what the average person needs. Next time I walk past his shop I'll show him that command list. Assume that's something that can be done while I watch him do it.

Can't understand why doing it the hard way isn't more exciting. 😂

I tried to message you too and got the same message. It said you have to allow messages from newbies in your mail settings in profile>personal message options : Allow newbies to send you PMs. Ive been on here since 2013 yet somehow I'm still a newbie. Must be related to post count or merit. I dont post all that often.

I was going to recommend a data recovery company if you are in Australia, and have no luck finding the wallet on your drive copy. We recommend this company to all our clients.

As for finding the wallet on the drive copy you have, I would scan the drive with pywallet:  https://github.com/jackjack-jj/pywallet
It's a python script, so you would need to install python2.7 (I assume you have a windows PC) : https://www.python.org/download/releases/2.7/

You would then need to open a command prompt, eg type cmd in the windows search bar. If you're as old as I am you should be fairly comfortable running commands from the command prompt.

You then run it like so:

# --recover  option tells pywallet to operate in recovery mode (ie. scan the device looking for wallet files)
# --recov_size options specifies the size of the device... 256Gioif you have a 256gig drive, or 1024Gio if you have a 1Tb drive etc
# --recov_device specifies the drive letter for the device you want to scan
# --recov_outputdir tells the script where to place any "recovered" wallet files etc.

For example:

In the above example
Pywallet will scan the entire e: drive (you would use the letter windows assigns the drive when you connect it) looking for the data signature of old bitcoin wallet files, even if they are hidden/deleted, and if found put the results in c:\recovered-wallets folder

Edit: have been testing pywallet and found that the above command threw some errors.
Didn't  like the decimal place in the size parameter. Didn't like the "\" in the device parameter.
Have tested this and it works:

Just got a bit mixed up at the start mate. Already told you I have't used a forum before & didnt realise there was a rule book. If you can't understand that I'd pop that in the ignorance basket along with my "unruly" behaviour. Lazy would be not responding at all for days to messages or taking the easy route of only concentrating on a wallet.dat file.

I've figured out how to edit so cheers for that. On the the subject of rockets I bought at 0.06c so all I really have to say to your rocket science remark is BTC to the moon. 🚀 😂😂😂

If you've got anything productive to say I'm all ears. Lets start with how to rebuild private keys using 8 words & a password on GPG4win, Kleopatra or Keepass.

Your posts get merged and/or deleted because you're constantly violating rule #32 of Unofficial list of (official) Bitcointalk.org rules, guidelines, FAQ which prohibits consecutive posts within 24h by same user. There's absolutely no reason and need to reply to different users in separate consecutive posts other than pure ignorance or lazyness.

If you have something to add to your last post even after a few hours past, you can always simply edit your last post if it's the very last one in the thread. No rocket science...

Yeah I do. Didn't have to wait. Scan & transfer to new drive took total 4.5 hours. Dude probably didnt start straight away & maybe had some lunch before he called me back so you probably about right. Noticing a bit of sarcasm. If you want the specs on the drive is a Seagate Barracuda 7200.12...first released Q1 2011. Now you can go calculate yourself silly. Ps. There was nothing wrong with the drive so guess lucks on my side. 🍻


Whys that...  Dont know what country you live in but of you can't trust your local computer tech to copy a drive without looking at your files theres something wrong. 60+ year old asain & all I said was there were old family photos, movies & music on there.

Spoke to him first yesterday. & wasn't suss on him at all. Nice guy actually. Scanned the drive first then copied it for me. Dropped it off at 9 30am & got it back by 2pm. If you read the story the wallet is only on this drive if it's "hidden" in a movie folder.

Moderators are deleteling half my posts so if that part of said story isn't on here that's why. Haven't done anything with it yet accept look at old family photos & videos. Was also busy doing other "things"

Pretty sure theres two ways to do this...the easy way find the wallet.dat (blah blah blah) or the hard way rebuild the wallet. I'll get there either way & if I don't I'm fine with that.

Finally password is in my brain no where else.

I hope for the OPs sake the wallet is encrypted, and the password is not on the same hard drive.

But, yeah, should have taken it to a professional data recovery service, not the local computer guy.

I've some doubts that you and your local computer store guy know what's required and needed to create a full bit-by-bit, sector-by-sector copy of your source drive.

He wanted you to wait? Let's do some ballpark calculation: assume your old 1TB Seagate drive reads 100MB/s (likely not that fast on average over the whole capacity of the drive, but we neglect this); 10s per GB, 10,000s for one TB, so under optimistical conditions reading the whole source drive takes at least 2h 47min (hooked to an appropriate interface that supports such a transfer speed), very likely even longer (depending on how "modern" the source drive is).

And you trust the local computer store guy to not keep a copy of your drive and peek around to see if there's something valuable on it? Well, good luck with that, sincerely.

Never played the formatting game. Once it goes on a drive it stays on a drive & I leave it. Never really needed to format anything other than a small drive that was attached to a pen. Did it just for fun. Had the option other Fat32 or NTFC from memory. Again no idea what I was doing just picked one hit format thought wow that was fun & never used the format function again for anything.

I get what your saying about the external harddrive & understand next level stuff would be required to recover the data. If I ever were to find it I'll wrap it in cotton wool before I do move it but I dont think it matters. It's pretty fair to say nothing has going to have changed since computer dude touched it. It's just been moved from place to place heaps of times same as this Seagate. I managed to find that pulled that apart, bought the sata universal jack, plugged it in & it booted straight away. That thing hadn't been touched in 10+ years just didn't have the files I thought it had.  I knew straight away it wasnt identical to the orginal external harddrive cause there was no porn file in the first list of files so had to rethink what happened. 😂

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Yo John,

It's probably about time to fess up. There is a very good chance I did use Keypass for the private keys. Master key is the dead giveaway. It's been on my radar along with encrypted keys from the get go just didn't know where it fit in.

My memory squishes everything I've ever done together when it comes to encryption. I was sure PGP keys were used same as what you would use for encrypted messages but I was getting them confused with private keys.

Was talking to a mate (computer programmer) about it the other day & he was adament PGP keys in there format were never used then imported into a program to create a wallet. I tried arguing with him & was meant to go away from the conversation then prove him wrong. Turns out he's right I'm wrong & what you have suggested is a piece of the puzzle I'm missing

I'm not exactly sure what I should & shouldn't be sharing on a forum that can be seen by the entire world. Just trying to play it pretty safe right now. I do appreciate your help so far & I've always found that honesty is best policy in life & it doesn't feel right not to confess before I move forward. Just been playing a bit "dumb" on the thread so people don't take too much notice of it unless they really know what they are talking about. I knew most of what people would say already ie. Mnemonics on blockchain.info, Github & wallet.dat blah blah blah.

I haven't figured out where the 8 words fit in to Keypass yet nor have i tried Googling it either. Been waiting for my mate to reply to yestersdays messages with the new information but he takes forever.

Been talking on Signal not SMS & he keeps notifications off. No doubt hes sick of getting message bombed by me for 2 weeks straight. Using his account as a record of what we both come up with as we go.

Plan on getting a new computer for anything that has to happen off-line that's never connected to a network. My understanding is thats an air gapped computer.

Ive read horror stories of people losing coins to malicious code written into programs on Github. If I'm going to keep going down this road I want to do it right & double then triple check everything I do before I do it.

Right now I'm assuming the next step is definitely the new computer along with downloading older version of Keypass to see what the story was at the time.

Open to suggestions. Appreciate your help & you will not be forgotten if I do manage to pull this miracle off.

Kind Regards,

UJ

There's my message to John for everyone to see. I see no issue posting this after some thought. As of now two people on this forum have been emailed pics of the Seagate drive I keep banging on about. Seagate 1TB not 2TB Barracuda. Released Q1 2011. I bought the coins before drive was ever released so there your concrete evidence it happened in 2010 folks.

I know this forum has the knowledge & talent to figure this out. Ive seen alsorts of crazy stuff being done on here. Just need the right people to take me seriously. Here's an example of what I'm talking about...

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/how-is-a-private-key-generated-from-the-seed-phrase-5249764

Plan on going to the cryptology department at MIT next. I'm not fooling around I'm just plain lost & being overly cautious. It's only been two weeks since starting this wallet rebuild quest started. The external drive stuff has to be secondary till Xmas. Even then I might not find anything & it's just waiting two months.

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Tried copying the 1TB old Seagate drive today to the new 5TB drive myself. Didn't work so went to the local computer & asked if the guy there was prepared to try. He was fine with it...also gettting another new 2TB drive today so he's working with a brand new drive that has never been touched & the 1TB old Seagate.

Asked about Linux & Ubuntu. He just me down & said don't over complicate the process. Wants me to wait till he's done a scan with whatever program he uses first before going any further.

It could be quite important to have that harddrive with the OS examined, as it might have information about what you used it for back in 2010, which websites were visited, which software was installed etc..
Windows keeps track of all this, and it's possible to dig into this stuff.

If the harddrive with the Operating System has been formatted since you used it in 2010, there is a risk some of the missing information has been overwritten by other data, but still there would be a chance some important parts of the puzzle could emerge.

I would suggest you stop using any of the harddrives, and get some help in securing these into digital images for a proper examination.

As stated in one of my earlier posts, i've been working with stuff like this for many years, and willing to help in whatever capacity fits you.
I get that trust is a big issue here.

Feel free to reach out in private messages (if you can)

This thing boots up no drama. Just plug it in & turn it on. Problem is it's not a copy of the orginal junked out external harddrive. It's a stretch that anything actually made it from the external hardrive to the Seagate I have infront of me which is annoying af. My skills at organising computer files are about as good as my organisation in life...a complete mess till something goes real wrong & I have to scramble to sort it out.

I do remember playing around with he hide files windows function at one stage & "stashing" the Scandisk files somewhere in the movies section. Actually got a few drives floating around right now I need to look at properly. Plan on merging them together as I find them. Got one more stop to make & rest assured I'll be checking every square inch of that property for absolutely anything that holds data.

Been around computers since dial up, floppy disks, Commodore 64 & Leasure Suit Larry. I know to make backups & have old drives all over the shop. Even pinched a copy of the server backup disk before i left incase I needed anything. Logged in as administrator to the server & downloaded whatever i could aswell. Didn't really know what I was doing either just new password was enough & it was a snatch & grab for whatever I could one night till laptop battery died.

I'm basically a computer tard that has an issue losing data. Hoping Vista computer never got turfed, there's also a Dell that might have some clues but from memory it has nothing to do with anything, an Acer after that, an old Alienware after that other Alienware infront of me. It's actually ridiculous how that I managed to cock this up so bad but these are the breaks when you aren't an organised person & bitcoin weren't worth diddlydik at the time.

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We are talking 2009 - 2010 when the external harddrive first showed up. Having a 1TB hardrive that was portable with mad music & mad movies on it was pretty much legendary stuff at the time. Guy I got it off was crazy into computers & even moved to Boston USA for computer related work. Looked like it was slammed together by a mexican (nothing against mexicans just making the point it wasnt your off the shelf piece of equipment). No brand name no nothing just metal brick with power supply hanging out the back that plugged into the wall.

As other states, do not use that external harddrive, it needs to be secured to a digtal image, which then is the one being examined.
Every time you use that drive, you're potentially deleting areas on the hardrrive that could hold crucial information about your wallet.

Do you still have the harddrive which was used by the operating system? this harddrive could also have some leads that could help you moving on,
If you have this harddrive the same applies to this, it needs to be secured into a digital image, in a forensic sound manner.

Unfortunately, an error also occurs...

Basic best practice in data recovery is to avoid touching the original storage media/drive as much as possible. You make one or more forensic master copies (bit-by-bit, every sector of source device needs to be copied). Faulty media is a challenge, there are some tools to deal with problematical source media. A common Linux tool would be ddrescue that tries to read as much as possible from a faulty media in a clever way, reading first all the good parts and then approaching the bad spots. Beware that stressing an already faulty drive could finally break it.

From master copies you make work copies and do any recovery steps on such disposable work copies. The idea is to be able to always create a fresh work copy of the original source media. If you screw up, doesn't matter, you can always restart with a new fresh work copy.

Strange, I have the option to accept messages from newbies enabled in my settings.

I tried to PM you today. Got error saying can't message newbie. Got the messaged saved. Will send it when I figure out how to fix the problem. Anything Linux related is above my head but do have someone that can help me. Ps. Think you have to message me first.

As I wrote earlier, hard drive recovery remains your first option.

You need to use this hard drive for reading only and make a full copy of it (dump).
The best way to do this is with dd Linux.

In the future, you need to work only with the copy of the disk.
The dump may contain certain bytes that relate to private keys, including deleted data.

Not 100% sure about the harddrive that corrupted location. I will try find it but won't get that opportunity for another couple of months. Was an external hard drive with its own plug in power supply with USB attached. Should have really put it back together but I just threw it into a box. It looked like a broken completely trashed piece of junk so fair chance someone binned it during a move without my knowledge.

Got it from a mate at the local football club with movies, music & alsorts of dumb stuff on it. Was pretty much an entire library of good movies & full music albums of every band you could ask for at the time. Always thought I had a copy of that drive on a 2TB Seagate drive. That power supply failed but i pulled that apart myself & bought a SATA cable/power supply & was able to boot it but filing system was different. Turns out one of his mates got me a new drive then copied everything back on there & more. Wasn't that long ago that the Tiktok video I watched reminded me of hiding a small Scandisk drive but couldn't find it when I went looking a few weeks ago. Was actually pretty devastating cause I was so sure it would still be there.

Anywhoo not even sure why the computer dude pulled the "external" drive apart in the first place. I sat with him & he plugged it into his computer & was able to see all the damaged/fragmentment/corrupted files in little blocks on the screen. If he could have fixed it he would have done it for me for nothing. We were basically "neighbours".

Bit of a crazy story really from start to finish though the entire 14 years. Literally thought I'd finally put all the pieces of the puzzle together but in the end it was an EPIC fail. Been smashing forums for the last two weeks reading other people's story's to make me feel a bit better about the situation. Was hoping password plus wallet address might be enough when i started looking & only then did the 8 words come to mind.

I do have one question you may be able to answer. If I boot the Seagate drive again & I've "hidden" the files someone where ridiculous what command would unhide the file & find the wallet.dat. I just tried searching for that & a text file. Neither showed up in a quick search. Still got that drive here with me. Haven't tried finding hidden files yet but it's definitely a different filing system which threw me off straight away. I'll send a pic when I figure out how to do that. Just says [IMG] twice when I press the picture icon.

Once smart phones came out, pokerroom shut down & then pokerstars got banned in Australia I had no reason to really touch a computer again. Could do pretty much everything I need on a phone. Don't get me wrong either I still have a computer here just don't use it.

Wallet recovery is an option I guess but right know trying to relearn everything & catching up with actual computer related things is pretty interesting.

Bitcoin wallets, cryptology, hardware, terms used etc. etc. etc. has all changed. Even finding a situation identical to mine has been a task. I've pretty much given up looking so decided to post.

Was hoping I could just figure it out myself to be honest with no hardrive & some common sense just rebuilding the wallet to get back what i need to load into Bitcoin Core then use the password.

Back then it all seemed pretty basic so why it can't be redone again beats me. Now it's a cookery...I can find clues here & there that suggest it is possible but just haven't put all the pieces together yet.

Gives me something to do regardless & until I've explored all avenues I'm not going to be happy. Got atleast a year till bitcoin crashes again as far as I understand it so plenty of time before I can just forget it again.

Pokermate above said pretty much zero % chance which isn't zero. 1% chance is enough for me to give it a crack. Got nothing else to do plus anything over a couple of million bucks on a $200 purchase is pretty funny stuff if you ask me. If you do the math it's a bit more than that. 😂😂😂

Do you have the harddrive ?

I did read the whole thread, but all i remember you stating that the harddrive was toast
Getting any data secured forensicly sound from that particular harddrive could be worthwhile, as it might reveal some of the missing puzzles about what really happened on that PC back in 2010.

I've been working with IT forensics for nearly 14 years, would for sure try and help you in any way possible, the first step would be to secure any data from that harddrive if you still have it.
Would love to help with whatever i can.

You could also reach out to this australien dude who might be able to help you further, he runs a YT channel (https://www.youtube.com/@CryptoGuide) and has a company that has a wallet recovery service with private sessions.
https://cryptoguide.tips/recovery-services-consultations/