Recovering Bitcoin / Litcoin wallet with partial PyWallet recovery

My wallet disappeared over a year ago with 200+ LTC in it, possibly due to me running CCleaner for Mac over my machine (which looks for and deletes .dat files as part of its sweep as far as i can tell). I have made several attempts to locate my wallet including using Photorec and dumping the existing wallet.dat, but to no avail. I am going for one last chance attempt to recover it before giving up and moving on.

I am attempting to use pywallet to recover the wallet from my machine by issuing the following,

sudo ./pywallet.py --datadir=/Users/patrickquinn/Library/Application\ Support/Litecoin/ --recover --recov_size 121.3Gio --recov_device /dev/disk0 --recov_outputdir /Users/patrickquinn/Desktop/Looking --otherversion=48

which returned

Read 121.3 Go in 58.5 minutes

Found 0 possible wallets
Found 0 possible encrypted keys
Found 1640 possible unencrypted keys

and left two files, recovered_wallet_1388812907.dat and pywallet_partial_recovery_1388812907.dat in the specified 'Looking' directory.

Can these unencrypted keys be recovered or am I snookered?

patrickjquinn

Posted 2014-01-18T18:17:03.080

Reputation: 31

Just as a side-note, even if the answer is "it cant be done" id like to know so i dont continue chasing my tail :) thanks. – patrickjquinn – 2014-01-19T17:38:11.743

Answers

The file recovered_wallet_NNN.dat should be a standard Litecoin wallet file containing those (possible) private keys that pywallet found. Install litecoin-qt if you haven't already, back up your existing wallet.dat if any, and copy recovered_wallet_NNN.dat in its place. Then run litecoin-qt -rescan (this may take a long time to start up as it rescans the entire block chain).

If the data found by pywallet included your old private keys, litecoin-qt will have access to them and will show you your balance. You can then send your coins to a new address or whatever you like.

It's also entirely possible that the data found by pywallet looks like private keys but is actually something else. They will still work as private keys (since a private key can be any 256-bit integer) but they will correspond to addresses that don't contain any coins. In that case, litecoin-qt will show you a zero balance, and you are out of luck.

The file pywallet_partial_recovery_NNN.dat appears to be used by pywallet to save its progress in case you abort the recovery process. Since in your case it finished correctly, you don't need this file for anything.

Nate Eldredge

Posted 2014-01-18T18:17:03.080

Reputation: 21 420

Like Nate said above, you may be able to recover it using that method.

In my experience though, i've never been able to actually recover it using pywallet. This wasn't because of CCcleaner(a whole nother story, but i highly advise against using software like this).

sFortunately Litecoin isn't nearly as valuable as BTC, so your loss is minimal.

Jordan

Posted 2014-01-18T18:17:03.080

Reputation: 21