Author

Topic: Searching old HD's (Read 868 times)

legendary
Activity: 1176
Merit: 1280
May Bitcoin be touched by his Noodly Appendage
May 29, 2013, 04:20:04 PM
#9
Testdisk looks promising, the forensic tools are also interesting. Smiley

Gotta look into pywallet - sounds very promising.


But want to clarify that It's not a problem finding the file itself when they are visible to the OS.
BTW: My guess is that the quickest way to find an intact wallet is to just use something like "dir \wallet.* /s" or "dir \?allet.* /s" after undeleting.
Yep, pywallet will search private keys on the HDD.
It doesn't search for a filename though as the file may have been partially rewritten. It looks for private key headers that you can find in a wallet.
It'd be easier to use on Linux as AFAIK nobody tried the key recovery function on Windows.

You can also use wxHexEditor (all platforms) that will basically do the same thing but it is specifically designed to search a set of bytes. It's less blackbox than pywallet.
legendary
Activity: 3682
Merit: 1580
May 29, 2013, 11:32:33 AM
#8
A real bitcoin treasure hunt!
newbie
Activity: 42
Merit: 0
May 29, 2013, 09:27:13 AM
#7
full member
Activity: 224
Merit: 100
One bitcoin to rule them all!
May 29, 2013, 08:07:19 AM
#6
Testdisk looks promising, the forensic tools are also interesting. Smiley

Gotta look into pywallet - sounds very promising.


But want to clarify that It's not a problem finding the file itself when they are visible to the OS.
BTW: My guess is that the quickest way to find an intact wallet is to just use something like "dir \wallet.* /s" or "dir \?allet.* /s" after undeleting.
legendary
Activity: 1512
Merit: 1036
May 29, 2013, 07:58:42 AM
#5
The correct tool to use is pywallet, it can scan the whole hard drive raw and extract any private keys it finds. There is a thread describing how to do this.
hero member
Activity: 700
Merit: 500
May 29, 2013, 02:31:05 AM
#4
Testdisk & Photorec: http://www.cgsecurity.org

vip
Activity: 756
Merit: 503
full member
Activity: 164
Merit: 100
May 28, 2013, 05:40:03 PM
#2
"F3" in windows ?
full member
Activity: 224
Merit: 100
One bitcoin to rule them all!
May 28, 2013, 05:37:42 PM
#1
I have dabbled slightly with BTC before, I remember that I dl'ed the blockchain and did some mining. Not sure if I got anything before I decided that it was not worth the hassle.

Anyways, I have a small stack of old HD's that I'm thinking of going trough, looking for a wallet. They may either be deleted or formated - most likely the latter.
I am looking for some freeware that I can use to go trough these disks with, does anyone have suggestions?
Jump to: