What can I do when the blockchain synchronization is stuck at a specific block?

4

I hadn't started/used my Bitcoin client for ages. Now, whenever I start the client, it is downloading block 135407 and does not progress past it.

What can I do?

Patrick Klug

Posted 2012-02-20T08:33:16.743

Reputation: 179

See http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/2914/ for some things to try.

Meni Rosenfeld 2012-02-20T09:06:05.770

What version of the client?Stephen Gornick 2012-02-20T09:46:53.507

thanks. I did try things mentioned in the other answers. I posted an answer to this question. @StephenGornick: I am using the latest 0.5.2 client.Patrick Klug 2012-02-20T10:18:08.367

Answers

3

Okay, based on the comments I have tried a couple of things but in the end only the following worked:

  1. Close Bitcoin client
  2. Backup files from %APPDATA%\Bitcoin
  3. Optional:Download Block chains from: http://sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/files/Bitcoin/blockchain/ to prevent lengthy initial download (Warning: the link advises against doing this if you have transactions in your wallet).
  4. Start Bitcoin client with the -rescan option from command line.

After that the client started downloading blockchains again. This worked for me. Not sure if this will work for everyone.

Patrick Klug

Posted 2012-02-20T08:33:16.743

Reputation: 179

3

I had this happen to me once. It was apparently caused by an incompatible peer node.

  1. Delete $HOME/.bitcoin/peers.dat
  2. Restart bitcoind

Afterwards, new compatible peers will be found, and hopefully, you'll start processing blocks as expected again.

Ryan McGeary

Posted 2012-02-20T08:33:16.743

Reputation: 282

1

I had a similar problem, but the -rescan option didn’t help.

In my case, there were a lot of lines referring to orphan blocks in my debug.log file (not 100 % sure it’s related but it may):

2014-08-18 20:52:57 ProcessBlock: ORPHAN BLOCK 0, prev=00000000000000001132f6ac32387e51960e3154b2ad4420bdeb64d77999388f
2014-08-18 20:54:00 ProcessBlock: ORPHAN BLOCK 1, prev=00000000000000000e9926124cabed78be0ae8bab22fb20acc643e94749120f8
2014-08-18 20:56:37 ProcessBlock: ORPHAN BLOCK 2, prev=00000000000000001b3f790fc107051c17702d305b08a3ae6325f40ecf44eae9
...

Finally, I tried to restart the client with the -reindex option which fixed my problem (but took 100 % of my CPU usage for several hours while reprocessing the blockchain).

So if the rescan option don’t work, don’t give up, try the reindex option!

paulgreg

Posted 2012-02-20T08:33:16.743

Reputation: 203

-1

You should update your bitcoin software. Old bitcoin versions are not supported.

Look here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=55852.0

Alex Saver

Posted 2012-02-20T08:33:16.743

Reputation: 1

It's true that regularly upgrading is encouraged, but all clients since 0.2.10 have supported to switch that happened on Februari 20th.Pieter Wuille 2012-02-20T16:05:45.750