So, a year+ ago, I reformated my computer and the one thing I forgot to backup was my bitcoins. After I reinstalled windows I remembered "MY BITCOINS!". I held power and turned my comp off, booted into a separate hard drive, and used a recovery program (recuva) to get the wallet.dat file.
But of course, when I ran bitcoin with the recovered wallet, it failed instantly on startup. "wallet corrupt - salvage failed"
Here's what happens with pywallet:
<~/Documents/Backup/bitcoins>python pywallet.py wallet.dat --dumpwallet
'ecdsa' package is not installed, pywallet won't be able to sign/verify messages
ERROR:root:Couldn't open wallet.dat/main. Try quitting Bitcoin and running this again.
Here's what happens with bitcointools:
<~/Documents/Backup/bitcoins/bitcointools>python dbdump.py --wallet
ERROR:root:Couldn't open wallet.dat/main. Try quitting Bitcoin and running this again.
Bitcoin is not running - I just restarted my computer.
I am offering a bounty to anyone who can help me recover these.
Thanks in advance.