Topic: Encrypted wallet.dat, lost password, any solutions? - page 6. (Read 213440 times)

Dooglus is right, and I was wrong. Thanks for the correction, dooglus. (I should have known better, I've read that code before....)

mricha, my sincere apologies for the false sense of hope. I'd suggest you start by reading one of DannyHamilton's excellent posts in this thread, perhaps this one: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.6591146. If you can remember enough details of your password, it may be possible to find it, but what you've remembered so far probably isn't specific enough.

I'd be happy to help you try a brute forcing tool (such as those mentioned above) if you can remember enough details.

Wallets backups include a pool of 100 (by default) addresses that it didn't show you yet, so you're good for the next 100 addresses you use (as new receiving addresses or change addresses).

When you encrypt a wallet, it deletes the old 100 unshown addresses and makes up a new 100 addresses, because the old ones have been written to disk unencrypted and so must be considered compromised. Your old unencrypted wallet backup won't include any private keys for addresses which you hadn't seen until after you encrypted.

Edit: if you encrypt using the RPC call, it tells you:

"wallet encrypted; Bitcoin server stopping, restart to run with encrypted wallet. The keypool has been flushed, you need to make a new backup."

I expect the GUI gives a similar warning.

Edit2: yeah:



Unfortunately that isn't true.

Okay, the problem was that I needed to rename the backup file wallet.dat when I put it in the roaming data. I rescanned after that. However, it only lists 3 transactions from June before I encrypted my wallet, and I have 0 BTC in my account. It's as if the receiving addresses from after my wallet encryption didn't load. What do I do?

My backup file is from before I encrypted the wallet. I replaced the wallet .dat file in my roaming data with the backup file, ran the wallet with the rescan tag, and now I have 0 BTC in my wallet. It says it couldn't find the blockchain. It actually says "No Block Source Available." Any idea how to fix this?

With 1 being least and 10 being most screwed... around 8ish I'd guess, maybe higher...


As long as you didn't create a bunch (100ish) of new addresses or outgoing transactions, restoring from your backup has a much better chance of restoring your funds if the backup isn't encrypted.

Take a backup of your existing wallet.dat file first, and then restore the older backup. If there is zero balance, close Bitcoin and try running it with the -rescan option, e.g. go to Start -> Run, and type "C:\Program Files\Bitcoin\bitcoin-qt.exe -rescan". Hopefully this helps...

Hi all, n00b and oafy moron here,

I lost the password for my Bitcoin wallet because I wrote it down on a notebook that had very weak binding. The wallet only has .3164557 BT, but I'm poor and only make $2500 a year so that's a lot for me. Like, enough to feed me for a month.

I run Bitcore 64-bit on Windows 8. The password was really random but I have some general ideas about it. It was definitely between 9 and 13 characters, but probably only 10 or 11. It had uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers, punctuation (maybe), and symbols, but only symbols that come standard on a Us keyboard. I'm almost certain it didn't have any vowels. I don't think it had an exclamation point or an @ sign. I generally like to use percentages signs, ^s, ampersands, and asterisks a lot. When I think of the letters things like q, r, w, c, v, k, and p come to mind. I'm almost absolutely positive it had a y, either uppercase or lowercase. The y was probably next to a couple of 2s? And the 2s I think were near some parentheses, either (, ), ((, or )). I don't think I've ever used a 5 in a password.  How screwed am I, on a scale of 1 to 10?

Also, I backed up my wallet on a flashdrive. I'm not sure if the most recent backup file was before or after I encrypted the wallet. If it was before I encrypted the wallet, it was also certainly before I received the .3164557 BT in funds. If I attempt to restore from the backup will it wipe out all the funds I've gotten since?

Help is greatly appreciated, even though I'm poor and really don't have much to give!

You're welcome, and thank you for the kind words.

I'll definitely be starting a new thread (in the Tech Support section). I'm waiting until I have a bit of time to finish up some documentation on Unicode support, and then I'll start one. Thanks for the advice!

Yes, I was going to suggest this same to you. I found your soft quite useful for some recovery works I'd done, including the recovery scripts. Sometime later I missed the link and I went quite mad looking back to the old posts, so it will be quite useful if there is a thread for your great app. And Thanks!

I'm not familiar with pandacoin, but here's the best advice I can give you. Basically, you'll need to create a test wallet with a known password, and test one of the password recovery techniques in this thread to make sure it succeeds, and then try your real wallet:

• First and foremost, close the wallet software and then make a backup (or two!) of your wallet file.
• Rename your wallet file, and restart the wallet software.
• I'm presuming that a new wallet file is created during startup (which is common). If not, create a new wallet.
• Add a password to the new wallet.
• Find and install some software from this thread that can attempt to recover passwords from bitcoin wallets.
• Configure the software to check your known password against the newly created wallet from above, and see if it succeeds.
• Assuming it does, use this software against your backed-up wallet.

I realize it's a pain, so you might rather enlist the (paid) services of someone in the Services Discussion section. Maybe someone with pandacoin experience will reply, but until then, this is the best I can offer...

i've got a pandacoin (PND) wallet, i changed my password a few months ago. i mixed up one or two letters. i always write my passwords on paper and ceep them in a secret location but this one i fucked up, at the time i didn't care to much as it was wirth only a few hundred usd.

but atm its worth a lot nore then that..

im not a geek so im green when it comes to this kind of shit.

i did a search for pandacoind put didn't find anything, so any help would be great


tommy

 It happens to me sometimes.

Which "this" did you mean?

Most of the methods in this thread will work on most altcoins which were originally based on Bitcoin software (and that's most, but not all, altcoins). So in short: probably, but it depends on the details...

does this work on altcoins to?

If all attempts to recovery the password yourself you can contact walletrecoveryservices.com.  For a 20% fee of the recovered wallet value Dave was able to recover my password in 2 days.  Super reliable and very honest guy! I highly recommend him. 

Best of luck!

well, you have to try to remember it, that's the key point.

As there's no real Wallet sub-forum, I think Tech Support is the perfect place to be honest.
When/If you do, please don't be shy about putting your "donation" address in the first post as people like yourself deserve payment (no matter how small) for the effort you've put into your projects and assiting the community

Thanks a lot!!! (or thank the alot if you prefer)

It doesn't get a lot of attention (which is just fine), so I'm not sure about it's own thread... but if I do, do you think I should start it in the Tech Support forum? That seems like the right place to me.

I agree it is a fantastic piece of work!

I recommend you to to write a dedicated post for your tool, I think it deserves it!

I'll take that as a compliment

But as far as I know, nobody has done so. The Python code is long (approaching 4k lines mostly in a single file) and complicated, and "evolved" into its current somewhat messy state (as opposed to being well planned out, sorry...).

However I did write some "extract" scripts that are short and fairly easy to understand documented here: https://github.com/gurnec/btcrecover/blob/master/extract-scripts/README.md. The idea was that you could run one of the extract scripts directly on your wallet file, copy/paste the base64-encoded results into a VM w/o network access, and then not worry about what btcrecover might do with it (assuming you read and understood the short extract script). At worst, it could waste a bunch of CPU/GPU time, but at least it couldn't steal you wallet.

Of course, all that only really helps if you're already somewhat of a "techie" who knows how to set up a VM. I suspect that many people who choose to run btcrecover are not techies, and are putting themselves at risk (speaking as objectively as I can, of course as the code monkey who wrote it, I claim it's perfectly safe ).