Topic: [Reward] Recovering partial wallet files? (Read 1593 times)

Here you go, this is what I meant by search the forum:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.3554532

Read mb300sd's post about his corrupt disk, and the following couple pages where people with knowledge offer to try and help.

Then there's also this:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/bitcoin-private-keywalletdat-data-recovery-tool-25091

PM some of the people in those posts.

.... That's not even close to what I asked. I know the password.

Can you do a brute force attack to crack the password, mind you that will take you some time.

Yeah turns out I went through every transaction in the last few months and all the balances are 0. Guess the 10 was an error in my spreadsheet!

You don't use "recovery" software that doesn't know about Bitcoin. The biggest failure people make is to use some "tool" to find a deleted wallet.dat on a hard drive and proceed with their wiping or re-installation. The recovered file is usually random garbage off the hard drive.

You scan the whole hard drive or backed up wallet files byte-wise to extract private keys:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/guide-recover-your-deleted-keys-38004

If you have not made over 100 transactions since the backup, an old wallet backup should not be obsolete. You will need to start Bitcoin with the -rescan option to correct the balance shown after restoring a backup.

The specialist recovery ship has way sailed, the cleanest versions of the wallet file were taken on day one - whats coming up today is very fragmented rubbish. I'm guessing the first step would be to decrypt the file in such a way that it knows what is gap and what isnt?

Been searching for 4 hours, trust me.

There is almost zero chance of a 100% complete file. I filled the disk(s) to 25% before I realised the backups were dead and I'd have to search. I scanned with literally every file scanner known to man and retrieved the best copies I could. The best ones are almost exactly the right size but just won't open.

Its likely heart surgery will be required.

THere is a lot of information on reddit? THey are saying to take it immediately to a data recovery specialist.

http://www.reddit.com/search?q=dat+file+recovery


So one of the guys in the dorms had bought some bitcoins (14) over a year ago when they were ~$7 and recently remembered about them. But a little over a month ago he formatted his hard drive and reinstalled windows. Is there any chance to recover his wallet?
EDIT: Ok so I ran some recovery tools on his computer and we got some wallet.dat files but all of them are corrupted. Any way to fix this?


Possible, yes. The data is still there as long as it hasn't been overwritten, but the pointers to the data have been deleted. If you have a friend who is skilled in using a Linux terminal you may want to make an image of the drive and attempt a recovery using Farmer's boot CD. Tell him to using how computer in the meantime if he's serious about this though. He could overwrite the data on the disc (if he hasn't already). This would make recovery almost impossible.


Take it to a data recovery expert ASAP. Turn off the hard drive and don't turn it back on. Every time you do, you're reducing your already low chance of recovering them.



You can try using pywallet on them, there's also this tool which I've never used, so I can't really help. Alternatively there's people who would be willing to take a look at them for you, myself included, but there's no guarantee of recovery even then and handing over your wallet.dat is the same as giving away the keys to spend the coins, so it would require massive amounts of trust. In your place I wouldn't give the files to anyone and would try to recover them myself. Worst case you can sit on the files until some future time when hopefully someone makes a point and click wallet recovery tool, although that could be a year+ from now.
permalinksave



A slim chance. You'll need data recovery tools. I'm no expert though.
permalinksave

On modern HDDs (2001+), one overwrite is enough to make data permanently unrecoverable. At this point it sounds like a forensic recovery would be the only hope, and with the format, Windows install, and 1 month of use, I would say even then the chances are slim to none (as in there is a chance the place might laugh at you for even asking).
permalinksave


I do not believe so. Unless you take it to a data recovery specialist and they tell you otherwise. Your friend may have just made a contribution to the "coins that will never be spent fund"

You might wanna search the forum. Just last week someone posted a script or tool to recover wallets from damaged drives, but I can't seem to find it now.

It will probably be easier to use a more thorough disk recovery tool with the hope of retrieving the complete file, than to restore a corrupt file.

Hello all, need help trying to get back about 10btc, will be a reward depending on what we recover.

tldr:

• Encrypted wallet file, known pass
• Windows 8.1 installation fucked windows and needed a fresh wipe
• Naaively assumed the automated backups were actually backing stuff up
• Wiped and reinstalled
• They wern't.
• Last manual wallet.dat backup was 2-3 weeks old
• Recovered 80%, but atleast 10btc missing
• Recovered a number of likely incomplete wallet files
• Bitcoinqt and pywallet are both unable to open the file [unable to open wallet.dat, close bitcoin etc]
• Pywallet is set up correctly and can play with a known working wallet file

Now, where can we go from here? The vast majority of the addresses were recovered with the 2-3 week old file, so we only need a fraction of the addresses to be recoverable from these non-100% recovered files.

Thanks

Edit: Locking as I believe nothing was actually lost.