Bitcoin gets the boot
It happens to all of us eventually. You try switching it off and on again and the machine fails to boot up. In short, your hard drive has failed and you now face a serious interruption to your day.
And slowly it dawns on your that you had a Bitcoin wallet on that disk. And that it is worth a lot of money.
You must get that file back no matter what. Here is a set of instructions that will allow you to do exactly that, depending on the state of your drive and the effectiveness of your backup strategy. Your continuous backup strategy has saved you from a serious financial loss.
What follows is a series of steps that you need to do to have the best chance of getting your bitcoins back. Some of these steps require bitcoin gets the boot assumptions, but you might strike it lucky and not need them at all so use your own judgement.
Shut down your computer and make sure it is off. Replace the hard drive immediately. Ideally, if your machine is under warranty get them to replace the hard drive, but make sure that you get the original busted one back. Use your own judgement here. Just search for illustrated guides on replacing hard drives for your brand of machine. Do all that you need to in order bitcoin gets the boot get back up and running as soon as possible.
Take some time to calm down. So long as your bitcoin gets the boot hard drive is unpowered and stored properly, your data and bitcoins will wait. These are available from most electronic stores quite cheaply and are very useful to bitcoin gets the boot lying around when you are dealing with raw hard drives.
Alternatively, you can mount your busted hard drive into a bitcoin gets the boot bay if available, or dangle an IDE or SATA cable out bitcoin gets the boot the motherboard. Power up your hard drive and listen carefully to it see how useful that USB cradle is now? In the first case the drive is trying to overcome a bad sector and the heads are having trouble making sense of the data.
In the second, those heads are broken and are tracking all over the platter probably causing more damage. Install bitcoin gets the boot well-regarded file recovery application for your operating system.
I found that the Stellar File Recovery application did a good job. Now point your data recovery software at the busted hard drive, and see if it can be mounted. You should power the drive down, do the operation, then power it back up and bitcoin gets the boot to get it to mount in each case before proceeding to the next step. Again, you are entirely responsible for your own actions and should use your own judgement. With the freezer option, try to make sure that you have your data recovery software and hardware all set up and ready to go since it may be a one-off that it mounts and it may not stay mounted for long.
If all the above fail then consider a specialist forensic data recovery service. Factors that you need to take into account are:. The online help for your Bitcoin client of choice will guide you here, but some common clients are covered below:.
Instructions for recovering the wallet file for the Satoshi client Instructions for recovering the wallet file for the MultiBit client. Hopefully this article has helped you get your bitcoins back. Make sure you protect your bitcoins by remembering the following:. Consider a small donation: How to recover your bitcoins from a failed hard drive.
August 17, Bitcoin gets the boot Tags: Bitcoin HowTo Tips Tweet.