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Trying to retrieve bitcoin wallet from an old harddrive.

Posted: Wed Jul 11, 2018 8:42 am
by parishy
Trying to retrieve bitcoin wallet from an old harddrive.
Hello friends. I have about 3 bitcoins in my wallet. But the wallet is in an old harddrive. The disk won't run. The website where I use to have my account is gone. No trace of what my wallet is except for the data on the HD.

So I want to go to a data retrieval service. Would you guys happen to know what folders I ask them to save or try to access on the HD? I kind of figure it would not be wise to tell them I have bitcoins and I need that wallet.

It's running windows 7 home.

Re: Trying to retrieve bitcoin wallet from an old harddrive.

Posted: Wed Jul 11, 2018 7:56 pm
by spauk
The wallet.dat files are usually in c:\users\username\appdata\roaming\walletname\ If it's corrupt it might be irretrievable, and if it's encrypted and you don't remember the password it would be hard to unlock it without some idea of the password. I don't have any advice for data retrieval from a dead drive, but I know of a couple programs that can be used to crack wallet.dat, btcrecover and hashcat. If the drive still works but just won't boot, you could try connecting it to another computer to get the files, or fix the MBR (master boot record) if that's corrupt.
Generally I think any data retrieval service would try to save everything they could. I have a similar situation with a wallet but it wasn't the hd that failed, I think I encrypted it when I was really drunk, luckily it's nowhere near 3 btc.

Re: Trying to retrieve bitcoin wallet from an old harddrive.

Posted: Thu Jul 12, 2018 4:43 pm
by ambar33n
Search in %appdata%, exact folder name depends on wallet you had been using. And the wallet file usually looks same or similar to “wallet.dat”.