Topic: reformatted computer now btc are lost (Read 4836 times)

All the well meaning Technical Advice presented here is all well and good.. 
but it is *assuming the owner understands how to use it*

To someone who describes the problem with their computer as "Fucked and wont complete a restore", it seems a bit like you guys are offering proceedural advice on brain surgery techniques to someone who might well be uncomfortable holding a screwdriver.

First Question is.. How many BTC (roughly) are we talking about here ?   a few, 10 ? 100 ? More ?

Basically, what is your wallet worth to you ?

If its over $500, then you shouldn't be doing *anything* yourself except switching the machine off and taking it to an *expert* computer guru.   

And I dont mean the 18yo next door who knows what "Regedit" does either.   You want someone who is extremely familair with NTFS, FAT32 or HPFS (whatever your computer runs) File Systems, Is *experienced* in using a range of Data recovery programs, knows enough to do nothing until they have done an exact sector-by-sector mirror copy of the drive first, and the futz about with the copy, not the original.

Such Gurus are not thick on the ground.   I *am* such a Guru in this area and I have been doing data recovery occasionally (a few serious jobs a year) for people for 15+ years, and I would estimate that not 1 in 100 (possibly 1000) IT techies would be even vaguely qualified to attempt such a task.   Any mouse-surfer can run "Easy Recovery Pro", but understanding what its doing and how to maximize your chances is not a job for dilettantes.

If you're talking more than $5000 worth of Bitcoins, even I wouldn't go too far myself before I recommended you head to one of the Big Boys in Data Recovery  - The businesses that have their own clean rooms, a full time staff of techs who do nothing *but* data recovery all day, and a huge stock of spare hard drives that they can swap the platters out of your hard drives into..

But don't expect to get out of it for less than $1500.. possibly up to $5000 depending on just what has happened.   If you've already tried recovering backups onto the drive, or reformatted it, or run any of the consumer-grade data recovery options, then your chances are not good, but they are still possible.   Ive had clients recovery from some amazing disasters, but its not cheap.

So, If its not too late, how about letting us know just how big a pile of bits you're talking about here, before you go diving into Fort Knox with the software equivalent of a chainsaw in the hands of a novice.

If its just a small quantity of coins you've lost, then by all means, wade on in, but if you dont know a partition table from an inode, I don't like your chances.

If you're around Melbourne, Australia (unlikely) and need some high level help, drop me a PM and we can talk.. Otherwise, find your local Computer Guru hang out or look up "Data Recovery Services" in your area.

Just use a service like http://www.bitprotection.info  For a little price you get a lot of protection!

classy

Pulling private keys directly off the hard disk is fast enough that it might even be worth making it the *first* recovery method you try, unless there's other information in the wallet or elsewhere that you need to recover. Unless you've got a slow PC or a very fast disk, my (publicly available, linked to upthread) tool for doing it can scan your drive as quickly as it can read data from it. It does really need optimising a bit more though.

This.

Windows flushes a crapton of data to disc on shutdown.

I once did a similar recovery for a friend of mine. He reinstalled windows including a format and forgot to backup his wallet. Big panic from his side, he installed a lot of shitty tools trying to recover the file.

DONT DO THIS!

Shutdown your pc - no, dont use the "shutdown" in windows, just cut power off.

Get a linux recovery or live-cd and boot your pc from it. make sure it does not write anything to your disk!

Now you can start recovering.

I recommend mondo or scrounge-ntfs for ntfs. They are built-in into most live-cd's.

If everything fails there is still hope:
there is a specific structure inside the wallet.dat-file, for example it contains lots of "blockindex"-strings, your public addresses (you can still get them, for example from your pool, do you?) and some more.

i wrote a little tool that searches your whole harddisk for this structure and recovers all private keys it finds - even if there is no reference to the file in the file system, even if the file is partially overwritten - and generates a new wallet.dat file from it.

Write me if you need more help!

easy, get your wallet.dat from your encrypted backup.

There's no way for any cryptocurrency to know if your private-keys are deleted, since that is outside the network by design.

A different cryptocurrency could be designed where it goes back into the network if not spent for some time, but that's not how Bitcoin works. Theres no way to know if bitcoins are lost or just waiting to be spent. Its the same way with cash.

What happens with those lost BTCs. Since nobody has them they are nobody's property. Can they be recycled into the system? Lets say 10 000 BTC are lost till now. Where are they? Can they be generated again? Is there way to determine if BTC is lost or not?

Best Regards,
Alisa

If you had a lot of coins, the best answer here is to clone the drive onto a bigger drive and then recover off the clone.

spin rite is awesome but is useless in data recovery after a format.. it is good at data recovery from having your HD heads crash onto the platters.


I cant see you formatting with many coins, if it wasnt much I say take the loss.

I do wonder how many coins over the years will be lost, from people doing this to people who just try bitcoin and stop when they have less than 1 coin in their wallets

32 gigabyte USB memory sticks are great for regular backups. You can get them for $50.

You can try this:

1- Buy a bigger hard disk;

2- Install the new HD as first disk;

3- Install your broken HD (with your wallet within it);

4- Boot your computer with the Ubuntu Live CD on it;

5- configure the network;

6- run the command: sudo aptitude install gddrescue

6.1- Take a look at: info ddrescue -> Examples

7- check the HDs! run: cat /proc/partitions

   You should see two disks listed, the "sda" and "sdb", new disk and broken disk


8- COPY YOUR DATA FROM BAD DISK: run: ddrescue -n /dev/sdb /dev/sda logfile

 After this, you can verify your new disk:

9- run: partprobe

10- Look for your partitions, run: sudo parted -l /dev/sda

10.1- Or if you want GUI, run: sudo gparted

9.1- Look for /dev/sda in GParted and look for your restored partitions

 If you are able to see your partitions, you are ready to try to mount the file system within Ubuntu, try "nautilus"

Best!
Thiago

As I understand it PhotoRec can only recover file formats that it knows about, and the Bitcoin wallet.dat doesn't appear to be one of those yet. The tool I've written (which someone linked to earlier) is probably the closest thing there is to a Bitcoin equivalent of PhotoRec, though it only recovers enough information to retrieve your bitcoins rather than the whole wallet file. For various reasons this is usually more reliable than recovering the whole thing, especially if your data is fragmented.

All the really powerful file recovery tools are specific to particular types of files these days, unfortunately.

Download linuxcoin and


got me out of many sticky situations

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

Just rename the file to 'Roller coaster tycoon 1: mac guide', maybe even change or remove the extension, encrypt it & upload to Dropbox.

If you have tons of coins or are just super-paranoid, make russian matroska-type shell container archives, each with their own 60-char passwords, each encrypted, requiring the previous pass to open the next archive which asks for another pass.

Then you can leave it even in your gmail account, memory stick, random upload service etc.

Of course you should encrypt a wallet you upload there, just like you would when you uploaded it to Dropbox or similar storage systems.

But if you are storing information in a place such as that, which is not a part of the BTC world(!!) you are essentially leaving something like gold bars in a storage lockup system. Did you give me that link so I can go and get robbed 
Come on, this is not just the same as any other information stored in bytes that there is out there that can be reproduced to no effect!
Hey, what about just having your BTCs copied in there and then uploaded by someone else?
Hahahaha........   

If you are thinking about a distributed 'cloud storage' system... Tahoe-LAFS may be what you are looking for.

You should keep your Bitcoin folder located on  separate external harddrive, then they are less likely to be infected by a virus.

Now what about the idea of a paid service for storing everyone's BTCs in a cloud storage system. A kind of distributed electronic bank?

Hah, then you're back in the Capitalist world of making profit from insecurity. What would the fees be like for that?

Or is it possible we could get a free distributed BTC storage system going using the combined might of the bandwidth/storage power of all BTC clients?   

Ideas..ideas people!

Yes I agree with this guy(or girl?) try file recovery it takes for everrr... to look trhough all the found file, but you never know you might find it