I pulled some data off of an old hard disk I had and one of the items is an old bitcoin wallet. How do I gat a program that will read the wallet.dat file? I looked online and my google-fu must be weak because all I see are sites that discuss apps and such.
That sounds like the format of the original reference client. If you want to use apps instead, grab from github any of the scripts that print out all of the secret keys in the wallet.dat file (or just export them using the original client).
No I dont want to use an app. I want desktop software that will read it.
The client from bitcoin.org will read it; it runs on Windows, Mac and Linux
Downloaded the client but I can’t find where I can load my wallet
Look for a directory %APPDATA%\Bitcoin and copy your wallet.dat file there, replacing the wallet file already in that directory.
When you initially run the client, it will run for a LONG time while it loads all the transactions from the Internet. Once that is done, if your total Bitcoins are incorrectly displayed, you may need to “rescan” all the transactions to recalculate.
I did that but it is said the wallet is corrupted. I’ll wait until the client is caught up to retry
Yes, I would wait until it’s done, then close the client and re-run it with the “-rescan” option. If that still doesn’t work, the cleanest solution might be to extract the secret keys and import them into a new wallet.