Corrupt wallet.dat file - Try quitting bitcoin and running this again I have made a few major mistakes and am making a last ditch effort to recover my bitcoins. I had a wallet.dat file on a previous installation of windows, after reformatting (with no previous back up, I know I know...) I realized my mistake and immediately attempted to recover the wallet.dat file with Recurva. Recurva listed the file as "excellent" condition.

When attempting to open the file in the bitcoin client, I receive the error:

"Wallet corrupted - salvage failed".


The wallet is encrypted, the password is known.

I have attempted to do a wallet dump using pywallet, however, I always receive the error:

ERROR:root:Couldn't open wallet.dat/main. Try quitting Bitcoin and running this again.


The command I am running:

python pywallet.py --passphrase=mypassphrasehere --datadir=C:\path\to\recovered\wallet --dumpwallet


I am unable to find any more resources for getting around this error - I do not have bitcoin running (even after a restart), and I am referencing a wallet that is outside of the bitcoin data directory (and also tried having the default path with bitcoin not running)

Has anyone else run into this issue? Should I assume the wallet file is corrupt and cut my loses? I've exhausted my google fu and can not seem to find any other steps to recover this wallet.
You should try to recover the wallet.dat with a different data recovery tool, I have good experiences using GetDataBack and PhotoRec. GetDataBack lets you choose different backups/versions of the file system, try all of them.