Need help -- bitcoin software don't load

[Christoph Bergmann]

Hei

I tried something and broke my client. Wallet.dat is saved, no need to worry, but i don't know how to help myself.

I try to describe what I did. System is ubuntu 32 (linux mint)

1.) I made the experiment to prune my blockchain.

2.) for this I made a copy of my datadir --> datadir2. Also I changed the bitcoin.conf in home/.bitcoin and my datadir2 so that it lead to datadir = datadir2.

3.) starting with prune=1000 in the .conf-files in both directories. Nothing happened at first. After playing with my addnodes, I realized that it still uses the old datadir to get instructions. So I instructed the .conf in the old datadir to use datadir2 and enabled pruning.

4.) it worked. But unfortunately it pruned not datadir2 but the old datadir, that had now the size of 2 mb

5.) because it was just a test and I still want to use the whole blockchain (to import priv keys) I copied all in datadir2 back to datadir1

6.) after it when I start bitcoin with my nohup ./bitcoin-qt & command it shows "loading block index" and than stopps. No message, bitcoin just shuts down.

I tried several things. Tried to start the old version - it didn't work - tried to start it with a new .bitcoin directory with just my wallet.dat inside - everytime the same.

Someone has a clue what I can do?

My assumption is that some index-files in home/.bitcoin have been changed.

Worst case would be to completely kill the software, and install it and download the blockchain again. But I don't know how to do -- just delete everything and reboot?

Thanks for help

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

Ok, I'm completely sure there's something wrong with my blockindex-files.

Now I start (playing around with the command lines ... ) and get that message

"Error opening block database."

What's disturbing is, when I'm in my client and it starts to sync from genesis, I don't see my adresses and the wallet file is not encrypted like it was before. I think something with my wallet.dat is broken too ...

 

[jl777]

it sounds like it pruned away all the tx using a different set of privkeys
so none of the tx with your privkeys are in the DB anymore

As long as you have the privkeys, you are ok, but it will require to restore the old leveldb with a matched wallet.dat

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

that's the problem. Things got out of controll and the client overwrote my wallet.dat. Have a copy from 01/30, but some bitcoins are on change-adresses.

As long as you have the privkeys, you are ok, but it will require to restore the old leveldb with a matched wallet.dat

What do you mean with this? My wallet.dat did shrunk from ~700kb to 80kb and was, after I deleted the pruned blocks (and tried to copy the old blockchain from a second datadir), not usable / a new wallet.dat.

Is it worth a try to take the new, small wallet.dat (I don't know if pruning changed it or if the client overrode the old file) and get the keys out of it?

I currently try to recover every deleted file and let pywallet search for private keys.

I'm learning something, I get material for a new article, but eventually I have to pay something like 2-3 btc for it --

 

[jl777]

dumpprivkeys

if that works you are ok
if it doesnt...

what sounds like happened was the 0.12 used a different wallet.dat (the one without your privkeys) and so when it pruned away the blockchain, it got rid of most things related to your addresses.

 

[jl777]

the size of privkeys is very small, 99.9% of the space in wallet.dat is the lifetime tx history for all your addresses