I have been asked to recover a corrupted wallet. The wallet is owned by an influential blogger, so I'd really like to help him get it sorted out, for the benefit of Bitcoin. The wallet has been used to receive over 250 BTC to two donation addresses. There are no outgoing transactions.
He has emailed me the wallet.dat file. Here's what I've tried so far:
1. Copied wallet.dat into a fresh install of bitcoin-qt 5.2
2. Tried to dump the wallet using Gavin's bitcointools
3. Tried to dump the wallet using joric's and jackjack's pywallet tool
None of those tools can open the database within the wallet file.
So I tried the "--recover" option of jackjack's pywallet. It finds zero keys.
When I look at wallet.dat in a hex editor, the start of the file looks like binary data, unlike a regular wallet.dat which has lots of NUL characters at the start of the file. Furthermore, the unix command "strings" doesn't return anything recognisable, whereas there are lots of instances of the string "key" in an uncorrupted wallet file.
Can anything more be done with this file? If so, I'll send it to any trusted member of the forum who is willing to work on it.
Otherwise, it seems the only remaining possibility is to run the "--recover" option of jackjack's pywallet tool on the original hard disk. However, the guy who lost the wallet runs Windows, which I haven't used since about 1998, so I wouldn't know where to begin.
Is there a trusted member who is familiar with pywallet's "--recover" option AND is prepared to talk the wallet owner through the process of installing python and scanning his hard disk (probably by skype)?
I'm prepared to pay a reasonable reward for the successful recovery of the wallet, based on time taken.
And yes, before anyone asks, he does know he should have had a backup system in place. Everyone who has lost a wallet knows that. The trick, however, is to know it *before* you lose the wallet...
