I lost a .dat wallet with 1.54BTC.
I found the file by scanning the original laptop used to create the wallet in 2014. Unfortunately the file seem to be highly damaged. Someone tried to extract the keys using Pywallet but it failed.
I am looking for a deep disk partition research, in order to find the key. Unfortunately I am not capable of doing this.
I am willing to give 10% to the person able to succeed. If that's even possible. Which is around ~7500$ now.
I created an image of the disk here :
https://mega.nz/file/ux4WQLDB#cc_OHpVKRNszxDrnl5Y4A1GwzfszlNNpVJwi43vtXJYAlternative download link here :
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.56502435Address : 1FHYSH65uKdVGhR7Y2QznxfBtLWhjotqUq
https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/1FHYSH65uKdVGhR7Y2QznxfBtLWhjotqUqWallet have a strong password. I'm ready to visit that person, or the other way around, preferably in the EU due to travel restrictions. In order to make the transaction as safe as possible.
More infos It's an old netbook from 2010 or even older. I bought it second hand just to create the wallets. I very rarely use it because it's very old and slow. I can't remember what I did with this laptop... I think I messed with windows in May 2020 (reinstall, recover...) I'm not sure.
I created about 20 altcoin wallets and 5 bitcoin wallets with that computer. So there might be other keys around.
Crossing fingers. Thanks for your help.
[08.03.21] Current state of search :
Found 22 altcoin wallets and 38 other wallets, while scanning .db files : Berkeley DB (Btree, version 9, native byte-order)
17 wallets with a size of 9 bytes which is impossible to recover
21 wallets of 29 bytes many of these can not be dumped because encrypted.
Now have to check the ones that are encrypted and their files size this will show if it can be done and be used as an indicator for the amount of effort it will take to try.
We know the wallet is encrypted so it all does make sense at this point in time. Will require further investigation likely examination on the bit level.
A wallet has a specific structure, for example like a start header and end header. Positions of the elements in between is fixed so we know what should be where after a certain start header and before a certain end header.
This means you drag a partial overlay over the remaining data and when it slides over a old damaged wallet, and there are still elements present then the overlay will match and ID the underlaying data and we make a snapshot of that for further examination.
If there are enough bits left on the drive then you would be able to recover the coins.
The 9 bytes wallets mentioned earlier are the standard that gets written in case of failure. Those look like this:
main
\00\00\00\02
DATA=END
It is empty, but it can be empty for many reasons that is why you have to compare those nine bytes to the original file. If the original file is larger then it means that there is more then those nine bytes.
