Topic: I need Help finding or recovering bitcoins off an old hard drive - page 3. (Read 2519 times)

Would Electrum decrypt these seeds too? is it the same math and hashing...… to get keys from words?

- If ALL 12 words are in the BIP39 wordlist, try a BIP39 compatible wallet (you can also use Electrum for this... and select the "BIP39 Seed" option during seed entry)
- If ALL 12 words are in the old electrum list, try using Electrum (it'll still work with old mnemonics)

Not sure if u didn't get my question or if can't get your answer!!

It could be an early Electrum wallet... but I think Electrum was announced late 2011... so it's not likely. Likewise, I think blockchain.info was late in 2011... and I think their early "X word phrases" (which were actually used for password recovery and NOT seed recovery) were like 15 words anyway.

Seed Mnemonics were not that common back then... I mean BIP39 was only created in Sept 2013.

Have you checked the words that you have against this list: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039/english.txt
I would also check this old Electrum list: https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/blob/1.9.8/lib/mnemonic.py

I have not checked the works yet, but thanks for the links.

It's possible that your timeframe is off... so:
 My time frame is sure between 09 and 2011,  but the events are so faded!!

- If ALL 12 words are in the BIP39 wordlist, try a BIP39 compatible wallet (you can also use Electrum for this... and select the "BIP39 Seed" option during seed entry)
- If ALL 12 words are in the old electrum list, try using Electrum (it'll still work with old mnemonics)

So if I download Electrum on a flash drive, then run it on my off line PC I will be able to plug the 12 word seed in, and see if it generates an address, then I can run this address through blockchain.com to see if it is valid, transactions history, and balances.... right??

There may be other, more obscure wallets that were around in that time period... but I can't really think of any off the top of my head...

What exactly are you attempting to "validate"? Simply that it is a "valid" seed? Or that it generates a known AddressXYZ?
Yes, I'm trying to validate that it's actually a valid seed for a valid wallet that still contains actual coins!
As the previous poster mentioned... running Electrum offline and using the seed there (would probably need to use "Options -> BIP39 seed" on the seed entry screen) is an option. You could also download the "iancoleman" Mnemonic Code Converter and run that offline... it has instructions at the bottom of the page.


If it is 12 English words... and you're sure that its 10 years ago... then I have no idea... BIP39 was from 2013... Electrum was originally 2011... what is the exact timeframe you are working with?

WOW!! hmm, so how can I safely validate that seed I have?? any programs, software/ hardware I can use offline???

Do you know/ remember who had a paper wallet/12 word seed back 10 years ago??

Bitcoin Core does not, and never has, used 12 word seeds... if you have a 12 word seed, it was not created with Bitcoin Core.


NOTE: There was a scam clone of Bitcoin Core that supposedly had a "12 word seed recovery phrase" that would be emailed to you when you downloaded/registered for the wallet. If you used this wallet, your coins are basically lost.

Bitcoin Core does not, and never has, used 12 word seeds... if you have a 12 word seed, it was not created with Bitcoin Core.


NOTE: There was a scam clone of Bitcoin Core that supposedly had a "12 word seed recovery phrase" that would be emailed to you when you downloaded/registered for the wallet. If you used this wallet, your coins are basically lost.

My question was specifically about working offline on Bitcoin core ( that's where the original wallet was created and I have it already up to date).

Any way some one can recover or regenerate (keys/ coins/ wallet) using a 12 word seed through an updated bitcoin core while offline?
or do u need a hardware wallet to do so?

in other words what's the best way to do an offline (keys/ coins/ wallet) recovery using a 12 word seed??

Thank you,

does PYwallet extract a potential wallet.dat file from the hard drive? (Thus altering the data on the original hard drive) or does it simply copy( duplicate the wallet.dat file data)? (leaving the original hard drive as it was before the scan)

How do I check if the partial recovered/ recovered Pywallet is a valid wallet? If it said no key found do I still check it and how?? ( is there a simple easy way)??

"Laboratory techniques" of recovery trust solely the plates of original drive . The heads of any HDD are not perfectly positioned when the plates are spinning. so, in fact, the separate  track consists of thousands of "micro-tracks" tiny shifted from each other and the lab methods take an advantage of that, trying to use the best preserved "micro-tracks".

For the OP in this thread i would advise him to scan the drive in read only mode with testdisk and i am convinced that if it's still there, it will show the wallet as a deleted file with the ability to restore and save it to some other location given the one fact that the sectors have not been overwritten.

At what point did anyone in this thread advise the OP to delete anything?

OP was advised that they could simply open the file with a text editor (or spreadsheet) and see what was in it... but any Transaction export from Bitcoin Core would not contain any private keys and would be of very little value in coin/wallet recovery (at best, you'd get a list of addresses that you could view on a block explorer to see if they held any coins)

About helping the OP , do you think it helps to advise him to start deleting things ?

If you never assume anything and do stuff without making any assumptions, you will never succeed in anything.

I know from experience that when dealing with older data, you can never assume anything, you have to do analysis without making any assumptions.
[...]
The right approach is to analyze everything, regardless of what the customer claims.