I kept all the files within except for the old block chain, which at the time was only a couple gigabytes, but am having troubles opening it in a new wallet in bitcoin core. I synchronized with the chain and made a wallet with the new wallet.dat but it says that it may be corrupted, but when i include files like, .walletlock db.log and blk.index, it says its loading the wallet, but for an insane amount of time.
If I were you, I'd copy-paste the whole folder into the computer you want to perform the recovery and proceed from there. First with the client you found at the laptop, in case there is some incompatibility between old clients and newer ones; I'm not really tech-savy, so this might not be the case at all.
That, asuming you are not trying to recover that wallet in the old laptop... If that were the case, and you wanted to load the wallet from there withouth downloading the 200+GB of blockchain, you could use the "prune" command and limit the size of the blockchain stored locally. You will most likely need a password (unless your brother was a bit reckless), so ask your brother for some guidance on this....
Using "prune" is rather easy; you just need to do the following:
Open the Core config file, and add this line
Code:
prune=N
Where prune is the size in MiB you want to give to the blockchain
You could also use this instead of editing the config file
Code:
"C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\Bitcoin\bitcoin-qt.exe" -prune=550
So long that it usually says it failed because the chain desynced after 4 or so hours. There are more files that i kept within the wallet like pywallet.py and such and truly im not even sure this wallet is from bitcoin, so any help will be appreciated, ill keep an eye on this post.
If you found the wallet.dat file inside a Bitcoin file, it's most likely a Bitcoin wallet. Besides, if it's that old, there were almost no Altcoins at the time.
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Great idea; but Wallet Software board might be better than Tech Support?
