How to salvage bitcoins from corrupted hard drive?

I have been mining bitcoins for years, all which now appear to be gone.

The bitcoin machine is running ubuntu 10.04 LTS. The bitcoin miner is version 0.3.20.2.

The machine crashed after a power failure/spike after which the blkindex.dat file was corrupt, along with very many filesystem errors (claimed to be fixed on reboot). I managed to load the wallet.dat file onto a Mac OSX machine, installed the latest version of bitcoin and let it run to update the wallet info. Before syncing the wallet showed 0 bitcoins.

After ~14 hours of "syncing" the wallet still shows 0 bitcoins.

Searching online, there are a few people that have lost their bitcoins when upgrading from one version to another.

I've built another machine with the same version of Linux and bitcoin miner and installed all the bitcoin files EXCEPT the blk*.dat files. It is now running.

Is there anything else I could try?

ExplorMann

Posted 2013-12-09T13:37:26.563

Reputation: 1

14hrs is probably not enough to have finished syncing the block chain. Depending on your machine give it a few days... – T9b – 2013-12-09T17:23:39.970

I'll try letting it run, but the Mac client claims to have completed its sync. Still no coins. – ExplorMann – 2013-12-09T17:44:23.273

Answers

You can also try running pywallet on the old wallet file to get at the private keys. Not sure it'll work with such an old file but it's worth trying:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=34028.0

Once you have the private keys you can import them into any client like electrum, bitcoin-qt, multibit etc. to see if you have any coins.

Abdussamad

Posted 2013-12-09T13:37:26.563

Reputation: 1 850

Or, run pywallet on the old HDD. – whiskers75 – 2013-12-09T16:08:08.910

https://blockchain.info/wallet/import-wallet

Once you have your funds, make a new local wallet with a client like Electrum and send the coins from the web interface to it. Blockchain.info is trustworthy, but not ideal.

Anonymous

Posted 2013-12-09T13:37:26.563

Reputation: 1 330

First challenge is getting the funds, but will try electrum when/if that is overcome. – ExplorMann – 2013-12-09T17:47:17.880