Bitcoin wallet Ubuntu 12.04

PreviousI was in the middle of browsing the web when suddenly my system stopped responding to me. The mouse was still moving, but none of the windows were registering actions. My system froze and locked up on me. After cycling the power, I noticed the kernel message log spewing out all kinds of errors related to the disk drive that housed my “/home” partition. My disk was failing. Normally, I’d just throw a new disk in, recover from backups, clone the appropriate git repos, and proceed. However, this time was slightly different because my bitcoin wallet was on the failing drive and wasn’t backed up yet.

Thankfully, the value of my bitcoins doesn’t amount to much more than a few dollars. Nevertheless, had I been reliant on bitcoins for substantial financial purchases, this could have been a disaster scenario. There is much talk on internet forums about people losing thousands of dollars worth of bitcoins due to hardware failure. Even though there was more than adequate warning to pursue backups, I didn’t consider that I’d be confronted with such a scenario so early on in my experience with crypto-currency. (I sort of figured the dollar value of my holdings wasn’t substantial enough to care, and I had only had the coins for a week or two before the disk failed.) However, after the disk failed, I was determined to get my coins back and I managed to succeed.

This post details roughly what I did to recover my wallet file on a linux-kernel based operating system with an ext4 filesystem. Unfortunately I don’t have screenshots and the process I describe below may be somewhat imprecise. However, my post might serve as a rough outline of how to retrieve your wallet in the event you start seeing evidence of disk failure. Please note that I can’t make safety/success guarantees about these steps and they may not work for you (in fact, they may even cause damage.) If you have substantial bitcoin value at risk, you may want to consider reading a few different sites before trying these steps or, better yet, find a data recovery specialist or expert.