Please help - a fellow Gab.ai member needs help retrieving bitcoin from an old computer

[nandibear]

Hi everyone if anyone here can help with advice or instruction I'd greatly appreciate it.

I was advertising the forum.bitcoin.com 4 BTC giveaway at Gab.ai and I received some questions about Bitcoin in general and also a more specific and imperative question regarding retrieving bitcoin from an old computer.

At first I was thinking of helping the follow Gab.ai member myself but then thought better... I don't want to make any mistakes with their bitcoin.. I'd feel terrible.

Here are their relevant comments from our public conversations at Gab.ai -

I have 1/2 of a bitcoin on an old computer and have yet to figure out how to get it off of there! Everytime the price goes up I start thinking about it. Thinkin' hard now!

...

It is an old Ubuntu install. I took out the harddrive so I would not lose my bitcoin. Mined it myself on an old Pentium4. Just for kicks, back when Bitcoin was just getting started. Time to fire that thing up again?

[Decoded]

First thing's first, you've gotta figure out if the ubuntu installation hasn't been corrupted yet, over the years. I hope it's an external hard drive, because internal ones (You connect it through SATA, etc) are more susceptible to damage and general wear.

Boot into it, then go into your bitcoin data directory. By default, the wallet data is located in this folder -

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~/.bitcoin/

. I'm assuming you didn't change it in settings, but if you did, you can search for it like this -

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find / -name wallet.dat -print 2>/dev/null

Once you see your wallet.dat file, get it out of that computer ASAP. I'm not sure what ubuntu installation you're using, but the older ones are relatively unstable, especially when that old.

If you have another computer, install bitcoin Core into it, close it, and navigate to the data directory (If it's on ubuntu, plop it down in the same directory you found it. If it's on windows, it should be in roaming/bitcoin to get here, press windows+r and paste this in -

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%APPDATA%\Bitcoin

. If it's on OSX, it's here - ~/Library/Application Support/Bitcoin/)

Put your wallet.dat in the respective folder, and then re-open bitcoin core. Go into Tools>Console and then type in

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dumpprivkey **YOUR ADDRESS WITH 0.5 BTC**

. The console will then spit out the private key, which you can import into a wallet like Electrum.

You will now have bitcoin in your electrum wallet! Hooray!

[nandibear]

thanks Decoded! I'm posting a link now at Gab.ai to your answer.

I will let you know if everything works out and/or if there are additional questions

[Decoded]

My answer was kinda rushed, because I was about to leave for a meeting with friends. If he has any trouble, I urge him to make an account and post here. I can give more details and make myself clearer.