Due to the recent torrent of people asking how to recover lost bitcoins, I present -
How to recover bitcoins from lost or corrupted wallet.dat
Table of Contents1. Did you buy or download the wallet from the internet?2. If you have a real wallet.dat file that you created3. Where is your wallet file located?4. My wallet file is corrupted. Help!5. I forgot my wallet password or seed phrase. Help!6. Recover wallet files from corrupted or formatted disks7. If all else fails...So, you have a wallet file you created or maybe you got from somewhere and you're trying to extract private keys from it. Keep reading because this topic will show you how to extract the private keys from real wallets, and steer you clear from bogus wallets that are sold on the darknet with no real private keys and may even be loaded with malware. You won't believe how easy it is to forge a fake wallet!
.1. Did you buy or download the wallet from the internet?
Then I advise you to please stop and read this.
almost all wallet files sold online are counterfeits. Wallet.dat files are literally just databases-on-a-file with tables for private keys, metadata and addresses and some other fields. Attempting to recover bitcoin from these is
a waste of time because the "encrypted private keys" inside the wallet file may actually be just random numbers passed through an encryption function!
With the current bitcoin price skyrocketing to $41K, so has the number of scams involving wallet.dat files. Please stay safe. People claiming to sell you wallet files may actually send you a compressed (zip) or RAR file that has malicious programs that
steal private keys from your wallet software instead. So again, please save your money. It's just not worth it for getting lost bitcoins which nobody has been able to retrieve before in history.
.2. If you have a real wallet.dat file that you created
Then read the excellent guide written by LoyceV:
Recover Bitcoin from any old storage format. It describes the format of the private keys you need to extract, the names of the wallet.dat files for different programs, how seed phrases work, and other important concepts you need to know before you start recovering your wallet.
When you finish reading that post, read on.
.3. Where is your wallet file located?
Each wallet software stores their wallet files in a different location. Here are the locations for where wallet software creates wallets by default, and what they name them
Bitcoin Core:
- Wallets are located at C:\Users\
\AppData\Roaming\bitcoin\wallets on Windows, /Users//.bitcoin/wallets on MacOS, and /home//.bitcoin/wallets , Each subfolder in the wallets/folder represents a wallet you have created. In each of these sub folders there is a single wallet.dat file in each of them. The wallet.dat file in the .bitcoin/wallets folder is the wallet for [default wallet].
Electrum:
- Wallets are located at C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\Electrum\wallets on Windows, /Users//.electrum/wallets on MacOS, and /home//.electrum/wallets on Linux. Your wallets files are all files located in that folder. They have no file extension and if you don't remember giving your wallet a name, look for a file called default_wallet. That is the name of the default wallet in Electrum.
Multibit:
According to https://github.com/Multibit-Legacy/read-multibit-wallet-file:
NEVER EVER WORK ON THE ORIGINAL FILE. ONLY EVER WORK ON A COPY OF IT.
When recovering the wallet.dat or the default_wallet OR ANY OTHER ACTUAL FILE.
MAKE A BACKUP ON REMOVABLE MEDIA BEFORE DOING ANYTHING.
Don't put it in your Dropbox / google drive / Microsoft one drive. Just keep it local on media you control.
This way if you damage the file for whatever reason, no big deal.
And when you are done, you can destroy the media and know 100% it's gone.
The last thing you want to happen is accidentally destroying your corrupted wallet in the process of recovering it.
Pywallet is the swiss army knife for recovering private keys from corrupted wallets. Install Python, download the GitHub repository, extract it from the zip file if necessary, and then run:
./pywallet --dumpwallet
If your wallet is encrypted and you remember the passphrase, run:
./pywallet --dumpwallet --password="Your password"
This will output your private keys to the command-line terminal.
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5. I forgot my wallet password or seed phrase. Help!
This section assumes you have the wallet file. If not, skip to the next section.
First of all, if you have a wallet that supports seed phrases and you only forgot the password, then you can create a new wallet and restore from the seed phrase.
If you forgot the password and the seed phrase, then unfortunately, all bets are off. You need one of these to recover your bitcoins.
If you have only forgotten a word or two of your seed phrase, or you forgot the order of two or three or a similar small number of words, or even if you forgot a few characters of your password, use btcrecover to recover your bitcoins. Go to https://github.com/3rdIteration/btcrecover/blob/master/docs/Seedrecover_Quick_Start_Guide.md for instructions for seed phrase recovery, and go to https://github.com/3rdIteration/btcrecover/blob/master/TUTORIAL.md#btcrecover-tutorial for instructions on how to recover your password.
FindOuter can brute-force a missing word in a seed phrase or missing characters in a private key. It's useful if you wrote your seed or private key down on paper but it got damaged and you lost a word or a few characters as a result.
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6. Recover wallet files from corrupted or formatted disks
A fellow forum user shared their experience of recovering bitcoins from their damaged partition, which you can read here: how I rescued my wallet.dat. Please note that the more data you have written to the drive after it was formatted, the less likely this method will succeed.
Again, DO NOT FORGET TO BACK UP YOUR WALLET FILE FIRST!
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7. If all else fails...
...and you have the wallet file and remember part of your password or seed phrase, you can contact Dave of walletrecoveryservices and ask him to help you to recover your password or seed phrase. Dave has been in this business since 2013 and is the only recognized wallet recovery service by the bitcointalk community, and he has a way of recovering your password/seed phrase without you sending him the entire wallet file. This means it's impossible for private keys to be intercepted and stolen.
Self-moderated against spam
Please use this thread for asking details on how to recover your wallet, seeds or private keys or suggestions/critique/corrections/improvement to the OP.
I'd prefer if newbies use this thread for asking about wallet recovery since there are some other wallet software I couldn't find information about. 
