Finding Bitcoin on an old hard drive

Hey everyone, I'll keep it brief. I picked up an old hard drive at a yard sale and stumbled upon a .txt file that has this info: Address: XXXXX It looks like it has about 0.12 BTC cKey: XXXXX (HEX, around 90 characters) pubkey: XXXXX (HEX, starts with 03) Do you think I can access this wallet with just this info? Thanks in advance.

Probably not. Unless the ckey is not ~90 ish characters but 64 since 64 characters is a base 16 private key. OR and this is important, if there is some other info on the drive as to what app was used. Take a look here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4959742.0 Also, bottom left move this topic to Bitcoin Forum > Bitcoin > Bitcoin Technical Support you will get more eyes on it there from people that like digging through stuff. -Dave

You bought the HDD or it belongs to someone? What you bought suppose not to have non deleted files. But if it has files that are not yet deleted, why do you want to steal someone's wallet. You can not have access to the wallet with the pubkey. No bitcoin private key that is long up to 90 characters. If it is not your wallet, you do not need to make any effort to recover the wallet. You said you bought the HDD. If this is not a made up story, it is better you avoid malware.

Indeed i buy old HDDsevery saturday in the yard market for God knows since,when.  Ihave houndreds of them in my garage. And i buy them for only one reason - in search of old abandoned wallets. Once i was lucky to find a wallet with 3 BTC back in time when it cost €3000/BTC, so all of my spendings (old HDDs cost not more than €5/pc), paied back. That is why i continue this "hobby". So now I've stumbled upon something that is not a wallet.dat and i can not figure out how to open it.

How many characters exactly? This is the tech board, not moral board. Who the legal owner is may depend on local laws. If you buy a hard drive, one could argue the data on it is your too. If someone is dumb enough to sell a disk with their private keys, they can assume someone is going to take it. Now that I think about it: if I sell a hard drive, I'll leave some random data looking like private keys on there Why don't you sell them again?

Most places have interesting laws about that. But for the most part, yes if you buy something with data on (drive) or in it (say a file cabinet) then that data and any value from it is yours. Barring copyright and stuff like that. Kind of like if you buy a safe at a garage sale and it's filled with cash, that cash is yours. But, obviously things like that will vary based on local laws. Back to this, as I said without more info it's going to be tough to figure out what can be done. But thinking about what LoyceV just said I think if I ever retire and decide to get rid of all the old drives I have after I do a secure wipe & erase. I will then put on an old OS and some random data and see what happens. Old people have to have fun too -Dave

Looks like an old pywallet dump file of an encrypted wallet but provided with the wrong wallet passphrase or didn't included --passphrase arg during wallet dump. Is the "cKey" actually 90 characters or exactly 96 characters? Because if the latter, that's an encrypted private key that's useless without the owner's wallet passphrase. On the other hand, you might have a chance to find "wallet.dat" or similar files if you try to recover deleted files from that drive depending on how long it's used.

That's evil , especially when you could also download random wallet.dat from internet. Although OP's motivation give me more reason to write zeros on storage drive which i plan to sell or throw away. I'm curious about your "hobby". Do you only those HDD only to look abandoned wallet? Don't you use it for other hobby/task such as running BitTorrent/IPFS software or extra backup of certain data?

This is why we have a pile of old phones in a drawer (although the privacy concern is photos, not crypto), and never sell old disk or USB sticks. If they break, I don't claim warranty. If I throw them out, I destroy them physically.

Nor really sure what you talking about Is it something that i can search for Bitcoins? Cuz now what i do is simply run disk Drill and see if i find "peers.dat", "Wallet.dat", "BTC", "Seed" and other Bitcoin related keywords.

Refer to my reply above about that 96-character key including the possible source; it's encrypted.