Silk Road forums

Discussion => Security => Topic started by: BillHampton on June 24, 2011, 08:43 pm

Title: Very odd and shitty coincidence?
Post by: BillHampton on June 24, 2011, 08:43 pm
So I had a complete hard drive failure.  My bitcoin program was on that hard drive with nearly $500 worth of bitcoins.  I realize now that I should have made a copy of wallet.dat for safekeeping and stuck it on a different drive, but I was too much of a noob to take this precaution (note to the rest of you: do this). 

The very weird part about it is my hard drive failed on the same day that account with 500k bitcoins was compromised and the market crashed.  This makes me think it may have been somehow compromised and my coins may have been stolen.

The hard drive is not recognized by my computer.  It will not even acknowledge it as hooked up but I can still hear the platters spinning. 

Anyone know of a way to get my hard drive up and running well enough to at least transfer my wallet.dat out of it?  Any way that bitcoin account can somehow be recovered that you guys know of?

God, I'd hate to think that I'm out of $500 worth of bitcoins and no way to recover them.....


Any input?
Title: Re: Very odd and shitty coincidence?
Post by: g4bb3r on June 24, 2011, 09:04 pm
Try running some data recovery software, preferably from a live bootable CD or something. Past that, you're pretty fucked.
Title: Re: Very odd and shitty coincidence?
Post by: rake on June 24, 2011, 09:12 pm
If the hard-drive is spinning up but not being recognized by the BIOS, try leaving the drive in the freezer for a few hours, then plugging it back into the PC.  It's been known to work in the past.
Title: Re: Very odd and shitty coincidence?
Post by: CrunchyFrog on June 25, 2011, 12:00 am
I'd second the freezer idea.  It's worked for me with entire computers before, so it may work with a dodgy integrated controller board (which is what this sounds like).  Otherwise, you'll need to to go (or ship) to a data recovery service and those aren't at all cheap.
Title: Re: Very odd and shitty coincidence?
Post by: wicked420 on June 25, 2011, 03:24 am
You can also do a 4-6 hour drive fix with the program SpinRite - good luck !
Title: Re: Very odd and shitty coincidence?
Post by: niggerjim on June 25, 2011, 04:10 am
You could try getting it recovered by a professional service, if you can find one on the cheap. I'm not sure how cost effective that is though.