Tried recovering wallet.dat from re-formatted hard drive using every recovery software under the sun , but no luck. So finally, I have run pywallet.py recover wallet option via :
./pywallet.py –recover –recov_device /media/reef/F*/image.dd –recov_size 78Gio –recov_outputdir /home/reef/Documents/pywalletRecovery
So anyways, encryption password was correct and I get a new recovered wallet with 100 keys in it. The wallet is from bitcoin-qt_0.7.2 on windows (2013)… I am happy to find anything actually at this point , but there is no key/address for the recieving address I am looking for(the only actual transaction on that wallet with bitcoins on it). I copied and pasted the compressed and uncompressed private keys found by pywallet into electrum wallet just in case a change address was involved (something I don’t really understand). No inputs found on any of the 200 private keys..
So, moving on, I used a hex editor to verify on the drive 6 different occurences of the address in question(thus 6 different wallet.dat copies) with “pool” data above the address and “mkey” data beneath it as well as ckey! data. But no complete wallet because drive was NTFS Compressed and fragmented. I assume that mkey has the private key for the address right above it? Is that correct? Also why is pywallet not discovering it? How will I access the funds on that address? I am also wondering how and why there are 6 seperate copies of the wallet in question?
I am willing to offer a bounty of .05 bitcoin for any info to allow recapture of my bitcoins. Thanks.