Helping someone with corrupted wallet, again...

[camosoul]

No, it's not me this time!

Here's the deal:

User made backup a long time ago. Has been mixing for many months. Wallet.dat spontaneously decided to become corrupt. Possibly because it was fuckin' huge.

Backup restored. But, naturally, those tens of thousands (maybe millions) of mixing/denomination addresses don't exist. So, dash all gone, whhaaaaa!

Since it's based on the same seed (yes?) as the wallet that was lost (it is the same wallet, just much older), would it not be possible to set a giant keypool in dash.conf, restart client with rescan, and poof, the seed will have found the same addresses and rescan checked them for dash, and now all restored?

 

[moocowmoo]

No. Dash-qt is not deterministic. All addresses generated are random.

The only recourse is to attempt to recover the keys from the corrupted wallet.dat.

Make a copy of the corrupted wallet.dat then attempt launching dash-qt with -salvagewallet

I don't know much about leveldb corruption, but I'd be willing to analyse it and see if I can help if -salvagewallet doesn't help.

If you want me to try, encrypted it to my gpg key at https://keybase.io/moocowmoo/key.asc and send me a link (or email me at [email protected] if it's small enough).

 

[camosoul]

He didn't save the corrupted wallet.dat... Bummer.

~230 DASH lost...

Is there a way to make the qt deterministic? Seems like a reasonable feature add learned the hard way. Or, meh because it'll be in Evolution?

 

[moocowmoo]

if he shuts down that machine NOW he might be able to scan the hard drive for private keys still.

pywallet with some modifications for dash plus a linux box to scan the (I'm assuming windows) harddrive might be worth it:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=38004.0

Specifially, it needs the -otherversion 76 switch to look for dash keys:

./pywallet.py --otherversion 76 --recover --recov_size 30.1Gio --recov_device /dev/sda3 --recov_outputdir /home/jackjack/recovered_wallets

HTH

 

[camosoul]

He's been messing with it for a few days before he contacted me... Been rebooted several times. Overwrote the wallet.dat with the backup file... It's in slim to none territory.

I guess there's a longshot chance that there's a tail about... I have the drive hanging out the side of my computer already. Might as well try.

user just advised: Ugh... He tried the keypool thingy, and already flooded to 1,000,000 keys on the wallet.dat backup which was used to overwrite the corrupted file... F. U. K. T.

I'll scan anyways, but not expecting much...

 

[tungfa]

He's been messing with it for a few days before he contacted me... Been rebooted several times. Overwrote the wallet.dat with the backup file... It's in slim to none territory.

I guess there's a longshot chance that there's a tail about... I have the drive hanging out the side of my computer already. Might as well try.

recovery software does miracles (scary what they can find)
NEVER erase wallet.dat, no matter how corrupted that thing is (who knows what tech will bring in the future, better to hang on to it)

 

[camosoul]

recovery software does miracles (scary what they can find)
NEVER erase wallet.dat, no matter how corrupted that thing is (who knows what tech will bring in the future, better to hang on to it)

I would have told him so, but he did all this before consulting me...

 

[camosoul]

Finished, found nothing. I think there were less than 1,000,000 keys in the corrupted wallet, and jumping the gun on running the keypool thing ruined any chances of recovering that.

As tungfa said, don't ditch your files because they're corrupted. I should know. ;-) I've been down this road myself, a couple times...

Let this be a lesson. This guy bought in at about $2 last year. So, it wasn't so bad for someone obsessed with fiat... But, fools who refuse to learn, then act like experts and don't get help... Typically, he's mad at me and DASH, not his fault, no... Only backup was the one I made in the beginning. Nobody takes responsibility for their stuff anymore... I tried to help, I'm still the bad guy... Whatevs...

Thanks for chipping in guys, but he crapped on his only two options before I got a shot at it.

 

[moocowmoo]

Did you make sure to adjust the recov_size parameter to match the geometry of the drive?
I'd have expected it to find all the keys on the drive that were generated (the fresh ones) at least.

Also, if anybody finds any bad recovery advice on blogs/sites/etc., please let me know about it.

 

[crowning]

User made backup a long time ago. Has been mixing for many months. Wallet.dat spontaneously decided to become corrupt. Possibly because it was fuckin' huge.

I'm pretty sure you already checked this, but if he's using a halfway current dash-qt there's a folder "backups" with copies of the "wallet.dat" file.