"Frozen Transactions": Why it happens and how to fix it...

[DRKLord]

"Frozen Transactions" : Why it Happens and How to Fix it!

If my walk-through is helpful to you and saves you some tears and grief, I would be most grateful for any tips or friendly donations you send my way:
XvWrvpERfUN8r1LB9JDMZS3Yu2rSfEYrHk
:grin:​

Have you ever tried to send a regular Darkcoin or Bitcoin transaction only to discover, much to your dismay, that the transaction becomes "frozen" at 0/6 confirmations? You wait and wait, but the transaction still receives no confirmations. Then you start getting worried, so you go to block explorer and enter the transaction ID but the search tool says "No results found"! Now you really start worrying... did my transaction just "disappear" into thin air? Are my coins going to be stuck in limbo forever?! Will they ever reach their destination or will I ever get them back? :'(

Don't worry, there are solutions! And I'm going to help you understand what causes this problem, and share with you a couple simple and easy solutions I have discovered and successfully used to fix this problem...

This problem is most often caused by poor network propagation. When you're using Bitcoin-qt or Darkcoin-qt you are connected to what is called a p2p (peer-to-peer) network. This means there are no servers, but instead there are lots and lots of computers (called "nodes" or "peers") connected to each other in a complex spider-web of connections. It looks something like this example diagram:

To better understand how this "frozen transaction" problem arises, let's examine the way things are supposed to work...

How Transactions Get Sent and Confirmed

When you send a transaction from Darkcoin-qt or Bitcoin-qt, your client software generates a raw binary message describing the transaction. This message indicates the coin inputs (the source of the coins), the recipient address (where the coins are going), the amount being sent and other important information. And just like when you sign a check you wrote to pay someone a certain amount of money, your client uses your private key(s) to "sign" the transaction and authorize it, so the recipient will receive the coins you're sending. This raw binary message (the transaction) is then "broadcasted" to the Darkcoin (or Bitcoin) network by sending it to each of the peers you are connected to. Your peers receive the transaction message and check to make sure it is valid. If it is valid, they make a note of it and then they broadcast it out to all of their peers (invalid, corrupt or double-spending transactions are ignored). Their peers receive it and verify it, make note of it, then broadcast it out to all of their peers... this process continues again and again, until the transaction message has propagated (spread) across the entire network and everyone has acknowledged and made note of the transaction.

During this propagation process, as the transaction message spreads across the network, miners and mining pools will hear the message too. If they deem the transaction to be valid, they will accept it into their current set of work. Each solo miner and mining pool has its own "work data" it is crunching away at as it tries to mine a new block. This "work data" includes the hash of the previous block, the current time-stamp, a list of all the valid pending transactions their peers have sent, a "coinbase" transaction (transaction which pays the miner the block reward if he solves the block) and a special number called a "nonce". Basically, as the miners work, they keep changing the nonce number and re-hashing their work data over and over and over, hoping they will get lucky and find a nonce value that creates a hash output with a lot of zeros at the beginning. If the hash has enough leading zeros to meet the current difficulty requirements, then the miner has solved a valid block. When this happens, the miner who found it submits his finding to the network by broadcasting his new block out to his peers. It spreads from peer to peer, much like a transaction message does. If the block is indeed valid, each node in the network will accept it as the next valid block in the block chain! Your transaction will now have it's first confirmation, and in your client it will now say the transaction has 1/6 confirmations!

Further confirmations require that more valid blocks are found which build upon the block in which your transaction was first confirmed. So when a miner finds a new, valid block which uses the hash of the block in which your transaction appears as the "hashPrevBlock" value, your transaction will then have 2/6 confirmations. When a new block is found that uses that block's hash as the hashPrevBlock field, your transaction then has 3/6 confirmations... and so on and so on it grows, like a chain, until the transaction has 10 confirmations, 20 confirmations, 100 confirmations, etc... Once the transaction has 120 or more confirmations, it is safe to assume that it is now a permanent part of the blockchain and will exist there forever and ever, until the end of time...

How Transactions Can Become "Frozen"

So why do some transactions get "frozen" and stay stuck at 0/6 confirmations?

Since Darkcoin and Bitcoin are based on a p2p (peer-to-peer) network system, everything relies on good communication between peer nodes. We have to have a strong "spider web" of peer connections between all the peers on the network for information to spread thoroughly and make sure everyone receives it. But sometimes there can be gaps in communications between peers, and information may get delayed or lost (not lost permanently, just lost in the network)! There can be a variety of causes for communication problems between nodes in the Darkcoin and Bitcoin networks. Sometimes your client software may be having trouble finding "good peers" to connect to. Sometimes your connection to the internet may be experiencing "hiccups" which cause your client to lose connection to your peers and you have to search for new peers to connect to all over again. Sometimes the "spider web" of p2p network connections may have some holes or gaps in it temporarily which hinder the flow of information from peer to peer. And sometimes weird things can happen for which we cannot identify a cause...

But no matter what the cause, when connection and communication problems affect our link to the p2p networks of Bitcoin or Darkcoin, we can have problems with our transactions. When we are having communication problems with the network and try to send a transaction to spend some of our coins, the propagation process we learned about above can be slowed down or even choked off completely. This means that when we try to send some coins to someone, the binary transaction message we try to broadcast out to the network doesn't get properly echoed and spread around the entire network. Our peers may not receive the message for some reason, or maybe our peers are having communication problems with their peers, or maybe we're not even really connected to any peers at all and no one hears it! When this happens, the transaction message may get stuck "in limbo" for hours, days or even weeks in some extreme cases. Since the transaction did not propagate through the network, miners' nodes will not hear the message and thus it will never make it into their work data and never receive any confirmations!


How to Fix a "Frozen" Transaction

Many times, when a transaction becomes "frozen" as described above, the problem will eventually fix itself. The Bitcoin and Darkcoin clients will automatically re-broadcast any transactions stuck at zero confirmations after a certain length of time (I believe it is 90 minutes by default). But sometimes this does not work, or maybe you're in a hurry and don't have 90 minutes to sit around waiting...

Solution A:
A very simple and easy solution that many users have had success with is the -rescan method. Basically, you force your client to rescan and re-validate your local record of the blockchain and re-broadcast any unconfirmed or frozen transactions. To do this, follow the steps below:

1) Shut down your Bitcoin or Darkcoin client completely by clicking File >> Exit. Make sure it is shut down completely not minimized to tray or taskbar.

2) Open your operating system's command prompt console or terminal. For Windows users, you must open cmd.exe to get the black console window which allows you to input commands. Linux users should already be familiar with their system console/terminal.

3) Launch Darkcoin-qt or Bitcoin-qt (whichever one you had the problem with) using the -rescan command line option.

For Windows users, you must type the following line into the console and hit the Enter key:

darkcoin-qt.exe -rescan​

For Linux users, you must type one of the following lines into the terminal (depending on whether you're using daemon or GUI):

GUI Client: darkcoin-qt -rescan
Daemon: darkcoind -rescan​

If everything goes smoothly, your client/daemon should execute a rescan and re-broadcast the transaction that got frozen and (hopefully) it will fully propagate across the network and soon get confirmed. But sometimes this does not work and you may need to try the next method...

 

[DRKLord]

Solution B:

This solution is slightly more complex, but is still very easy and has always worked for me instantaneously and without fail. What we're going to do is get the raw hex data (the raw binary transaction message converted into its numeric hexadecimal equivalent) and manually re-broadcast it to the network from a different node. If all goes well, this will cause the transaction message to instantly spread across the network and finally make it to all the peers online and, most importantly, the miners and mining pools which will add it to the next block and quickly confirm it. Please follow the steps below:

1) Click on the Transactions tab in your client window and select the frozen transaction

2) Right-click on the transaction and select Show Transaction Details to bring up the Transaction Details pop-up window

3) Now highlight the entire Transaction ID number and copy it to the clipboard (i.e., right-click and select Copy or hit Ctrl+C)

EXAMPLE: 52123febc4f61fe384252a64ee7daebabc3cabae97b7954b90aa70232794d5f0​

4) Now close the Transaction Details window and select Help >> Debug Window in the top menu bar of your client window. The Debug Window has two tabs: Information and Console. You need to switch to the Console tab so we can input commands for the Darkcoin/Bitcoin client.

5) Now we're going to use the getrawtransaction command to obtain the raw transaction data in hex form. The getrawtransaction command accepts a transaction ID number as its parameter. So to use it, we will call the getrawtransaction method and feed it our transaction ID we just copied from the Transaction Details window a moment ago. Type in the following command and press Enter to execute:

getrawtransaction <your transaction ID>​

Obviously, you replace the <your transaction ID> part with your transaction ID number you copied from the Transaction Details window in Step #3. For example, I typed in the following:

getrawtransaction 52123febc4f61fe384252a64ee7daebabc3cabae97b7954b90aa70232794d5f0​

6) As soon as you press enter, there should be a response in the Console window. My console window showed me the following response:

getrawtransaction 52123febc4f61fe384252a64ee7daebabc3cabae97b7954b90aa70232794d5f0

0100000001a09c05d6f32801adc8592ed17214b88d8cfd643448d6cfa5fadd1a0c4b34cdf4000000006b483045022071be3697934aa53ed86f217b34531e3f4f0ecb6c41df8f221f536e5005621ee4022100fe06e286452a3cdecb8fecd67f05d8d7b9357759c9cf86f7500d2aaf2e12b757012103abb9442be150b2499450c29f76880430ee1959b3c419b3dbb8f5289a34cf70ceffffffff01605af405000000001976a914edf6e6c268f77059c701fee4c05276af662fbed988ac00000000​

The "getrawtransaction <tx id>" line will be displayed in a bluish-green color if the command succeeds, and beneath it your client will respond giving you the raw transaction data (in black text). This is what we want! Now we will highlight all of the hexadecimal data (just the black text; don't copy the command line where you typed getrawtransaction <tx id>) and copy it to our clipboard.

7) Now that we have obtained the raw hex data of our frozen transaction, we can get it unfrozen by re-broadcasting it to the network through a different node. You will either need another computer running the client software (Bitcoin-qt or Darkcoin-qt) with a good connection to the network or you will need a friend online to help you complete the final part of the process. You can't do it with the same client from which the transaction originated because it already knows about the transaction and will reject it as invalid or a double-spending tx.

But now we need to copy our raw tx data somewhere that we can copy+paste it from on another computer, or send it to a friend or helper who will help us complete the process. When I did it, I just took my tx data and pasted it up at PasteBin.com so I could get on my other PC and copy it. But you can also send it to a friend (or yourself) through email, Skype or a private message on forums. If you don't have another computer to use and can't find anyone to help you, you can just paste your raw transaction data here or pm me and I will help you.

Alternatively, if you're a more experienced user, you can do this on the same PC from which the problem originated. To do so, you need to navigate to your Bitcoin or Darkcoin data directory (default data directory for Windows users is: C:\Users\<your username>\AppData\Roaming\Darkcoin) and make a copy of it in an easily accessible location (like your desktop). Open the new copy of the data directory and delete the wallet.dat file inside. Just make sure you're not deleting your original wallet.dat file or that you have a back-up copy of it! Once you've done this, you need to launch a second instance of Darkcoin-qt or Bitcoin-qt and tell it to use the new copy of your data directory as its data directory. You do this by launching your client with the -datadir=<path> command and proceeding to the next step...

Example (Windows):

darkcoin-qt.exe -datadir=C:\Users\DRKLord\Desktop\DataDirCopy​

Now that we have a second node (Darkcoin-qt running on different computer, a friend helping us remotely or a second local instance of Darkcoin-qt) we can complete the process by using the sendrawtransaction command and re-broadcasting the frozen transaction to the network. To do so, we must go to Help >> Debug Window >> Console on our other client node to open the Console window and complete the following steps (if you have a friend online helping you, he/she needs to do these steps):

A) Open the Console window in the second Darkcoin/Bitcoin client (or have your friend open their Console and do the following)

B) Now copy the raw transaction data we got from the getrawtransaction command earlier and saved on PasteBin or stored elsewhere

C) We must now input the sendrawtransaction <tx data> command and press the Enter key:

Command:

sendrawtransaction <paste raw hex data here>​

Example:

sendrawtransaction 0100000001a09c05d6f32801adc8592ed17214b88d8cfd643448d6cfa5fadd1a0c4b34cdf4000000006b483045022071be3697934aa53ed86f217b34531e3f4f0ecb6c41df8f221f536e5005621ee4022100fe06e286452a3cdecb8fecd67f05d8d7b9357759c9cf86f7500d2aaf2e12b757012103abb9442be150b2499450c29f76880430ee1959b3c419b3dbb8f5289a34cf70ceffffffff01605af405000000001976a914edf6e6c268f77059c701fee4c05276af662fbed988ac00000000 ​

D) If done correctly your input should show up in the Console now in bluish-green text, as I demonstrated above, and your transaction has now been re-broadcasted to the network and should now fully propagate and soon receive confirmations! ​

That's it, we did it! I've never had a problem with this method failing or not working, but if it doesn't work for you do not despair. If you're not an advanced or experienced user you may have just done it wrong and need to get some help. Or maybe there is another problem requiring some help from a more experienced user. In any case, don't panic. Coins don't just evaporate into thin air, and there's always a solution! ;-)

Conclusion

Now we understand how transactions work: how they're sent, how they propagate across the Bitcoin and Darkcoin networks and how miners include them in blocks and confirm them. And we also explored the problem of "frozen transactions" and what causes them and learned two pretty quick and easy ways to fix them if it ever happens.

If you have any questions about what we've just learned or you're experiencing any problems that you're unable to fix feel free to reply here or send me a pm. I'm always willing to help out when I have the time!

Regards,

The DRK Lord

 

[vertoe]

Nice, didnt know you can simply rebroadcast the rawtransaction, but of course thats straight forward. Good read!

 

[yidakee]

Nice, didnt know you can simply rebroadcast the rawtransaction, but of course thats straight forward. Good read!

Happened to me, exactly during the last fork. I know you're not supposed to send funds during a fork, but I was 100% sure both sending and receiving clients were on the right fork. For some reason (as explained) it got stuck.

No did not manage to re-broadcast the tx (probably panic user error), and after 1:30mins, it finally hit the blockchain. It was the first time it happened to me, and I was almost in panic mode! ("almost", being an understatement)

Thanks DRKLord !! Great info and extremely useful !

 

[DRKLord]

I didn't know about this method either, until I figured it out! :what:

A couple months ago, I had a frozen Bitcoin transaction in my main Bitcoin-qt wallet. And I figured there had to be a way I could manually force the bitcoind daemon to re-broadcast the transaction again so the network would see it. I looked over the list of commands returned by the help command and thought: "Aha! I bet I could use getrawtransaction to get the raw tx data in its hexadecimal representation, and then force a manual re-broadcast with the sendrawtransaction command!" So I tried it, but it did not work and I received an error message like this:

transaction rejected (Code -1)

Dang... ​

So I thought maybe my idea just doesn't work, not even realizing I was really onto something and had found the perfect solution! A few minutes later, my frozen Bitcoin transaction finally propagated on its own (purely by luck/chance) and made it into the next block and got its first confirmation. So at that point I just quit thinking about it and went about my business...

Today, however, my girlfriend tried to send me 1.00 DRK to a specific address because I needed an input with exactly 11.00 DRK @ 10/6 confirmations for a specific Darksend test case... she was sitting right here next to me using her laptop, and I was on my desktop. She sent the transaction and then I looked back to my screen, expecting to see the little Incoming Transaction tool-tip notification pop up from my system tray... Nothing happened... I wait a few minutes... Still nothing... I jumped on her laptop myself and looked at her Transactions tab and see that it's still sitting stuck at 0/6 confirmations, already 15+ minutes after it was sent. So I copied the TX-ID and searched for it on a couple different block explorers... none of them had any record of the transaction! So I realized I had yet another one of those annoying "frozen transactions", and I really didn't want to sit around waiting on it for hours! I had to get this fixed so I could do my test and leave the house to actually get some stuff accomplished today...

The first thing I tried was the old -rescan method, but to no avail. And now that I think of it, it seems like that method would only work for transactions you have received but your client erroneously believes are still unconfirmed; thus it disallows you to spend the coin (may be wrong about that, but it seems to be that way). So I then thought back to my original idea of using get/sendrawtransaction and I had a revelation... the reason it didn't work when I tried it on bitcoin-qt was because MY wallet and MY client instance already had record of the transaction, even though the rest of the network did not. So when I tried the sendrawtransaction command, naturally, bitcoind or darkcoind was going to reject it as an error or possible double-spend attempt because it was identical to a transaction it already knows about! So then I realized my original theory was correct all along, but I'd just over-looked one important detail: using a different node to re-broadcast the frozen transaction from! As long as that client/node had never seen the transaction before and had no record of it, it would not reject it as invalid (or an error) and would push it out to all of its connected peers and get it "unfrozen" in a hurry...

So, armed with this realization, I opened the console on my girlfriend's Darkcoin client, typed getrawtransaction <txid> and copied the hex data it returned and stuck it on PasteBin. Switched over to my desktop and opened my client window (which controls the wallet/address the 1.00 DRK was supposed to be going to but never reached) and opened its console up... copied the tx hex data from PasteBin, and used it as the parameter for the sendrawtransaction <tx data> method... Boom boom! Instantaneous success... the Incoming Transaction notification popped up from the system tray, and the transaction got to 1/6 confirmations in less than 45 seconds!

I was quite pleased the results, but even more pleased to have finally found such an easy, straight-forward, no-nonsense way to solve the problem of frozen unconfirmed transactions. I seriously doubt I'm the first person in the world to ever do this, but I've never seen this method described anywhere online as a solution to frozen transactions before! I've had this problem numerous times since I started using Bitcoin in 2011, and no one ever mentioned it to me. Even when I made posts on BitcoinTalk seeking help, the only advice people could recommend was either to use -rescan, try a double-spend, write my own program to connect to the network and clone the transaction or just sit around and wait on it to work itself out. Since this is a common, recurring problem for users of Bitcoin, Litecoin, Darkcoin and other cryptos based on the Bitcoin-qt and Bitcoind code, I knew it would be a great disservice to the crypto world not to share my new knowledge and help people solve this annoying and sometimes frightening problem!

So that's the story behind it and how I figured it out... It would probably be a good idea to sticky this thread so users who experience this problem in the future will be able to find this thread and fix their frozen transactions before they panic or try to blame the dev team for it, LMAO! In any case, now we know a quick and simple way to "unfreeze" these problematic transactions and get them to confirm.

Regards,

The DRK Lord

P.S. ---

If my walk-through is helpful to you and saves you some tears and grief, I would be most grateful for any tips or friendly donations you send my way:
XvWrvpERfUN8r1LB9JDMZS3Yu2rSfEYrHk
:grin:​

 

[yidakee]

That is EXACTLY what happened to me! But I'd never had the realisation you had, which was brilliant dude, that since I was using the "stuck" wallet to re-braodcast, it would not let me.

So I was doing it "right" all along too !!! phheeeewwww!!! Just had to use another node (ergo QT) to transmit the sendrawtransaction - dooh!! :tongue:

Thanks for sharing!

EDIT: Just had a realisation myself

Re-broadcasting is different from double-spending, so it makes sense it should work. What if you're in the middle of no-where with only 1 machine? Backup-wallet, delete and create a blank new one, re-broadcast, import back real wallet?
Seems kind of quirky, but hey, as long as it works...

 

[DRKLord]

Yeah, if you've only got one machine and no one to help you remotely you can still use this method. In my post explaining this method I described how to launch a second instance of Bitcoin/Darkcoin-qt using the -datadir=<path> command to point it at a copy of your main data directory, so you will then have two distinct nodes running on the same machine. It's the same way I launch multiple instances on the same machine for isolated test nets (aka, "test-net in a box").

 

[stonehedge]

Ok its early here and I really don't know if I can trust my memory of what happened but the following just happened to me with v0.10.11.6-beta
1) Woke up, powered up laptop, opened QT, sent 1,000DRK to another wallet.
2) Transaction ID created, appears as a non confirmed transaction both locally and at destination but it sits for half an hour without any confirmations.
3) Find this thread, try a rescan. Nothing happens. I then remembered that I wasn't prompted to enter my wallet key!
4) Unlocked wallet in console and transaction immediately starts confirming.

Or at least I think thats what happened. I need some more sleep.

 

[vertoe]

Ok its early here and I really don't know if I can trust my memory of what happened but the following just happened to me with v0.10.11.6-beta
1) Woke up, powered up laptop, opened QT, sent 1,000DRK to another wallet.
2) Transaction ID created, appears as a non confirmed transaction both locally and at destination but it sits for half an hour without any confirmations.
3) Find this thread, try a rescan. Nothing happens. I then remembered that I wasn't prompted to enter my wallet key!
4) Unlocked wallet in console and transaction immediately starts confirming.

Or at least I think thats what happened. I need some more sleep.

If you see the tx in the recieving wallet you dont need to rescan.
If you wait pretty long, check the block explorer, you will see like 20 blocks in last 10 minutes and a diff of like 10,000 because some major multipool jumped in and now it's gone again and you need to wait for some hours for new blocks to roll. I had that multiple times with the 6th confirmation of my masternode, damn that's annoying...

 

[stonehedge]

I had a feeling that it was complete coincidence. I know that my wallet was locked though. I must have been so tired that I forgot that I had unlocked it.

Cheers for the info. Nice to know.

 

[booyah]

i have a frozen transaction, how do i rescan on mac through the terminal as i tried the sendrawtransction but my hex code is massive not sure if it because my wallet is encrypted but received an error code on first time
TX decode failed (code -22)
tried it again and says
sendrawtransaction <hex string>
Submits raw transaction (serialized, hex-encoded) to local node and network. (code -1)
Any help would be appreciated, thanks

 

[booyah]

found mac terminal command to rescan which worked, command is as per below for other mac users.
terminal command -> /Applications/Darkcoin-Qt.app/Contents/MacOS/Darkcoin-Qt -rescan &

 

[iHeartSmartArt]

So, armed with this realization, I opened the console on my girlfriend's Darkcoin client, typed getrawtransaction <txid> and copied the hex data it returned and stuck it on PasteBin. Switched over to my desktop and opened my client window (which controls the wallet/address the 1.00 DRK was supposed to be going to but never reached) and opened its console up... copied the tx hex data from PasteBin, and used it as the parameter for the sendrawtransaction <tx data> method... Boom boom! Instantaneous success... the Incoming Transaction notification popped up from the system tray, and the transaction got to 1/6 confirmations in less than 45 seconds!

Are you using a second computer and different wallet to seach the tx id?

found mac command to rescan but still not showing in blockchain :-(

 

[booyah]

hi, iheartsmartart, its sorted with rescan function, i posted the mac terminal command for other mac users to use in my previous post, thanks for your assistance, was getting worried as it was 584 coins but good now

 

[Sub-Ether]

Thanks DRKLord, your superb explanation helped clarify a number of mental blocks I seemed to be having about the blockchains inner workings. And well spotted on working out how to send the raw transaction hex data via a different node, I get that, now.

 

[aleix]

Thanks a lot for this DRKLord! This guide really worked (the second solution) :smile:

 

[alex1010]

"Frozen Transactions" : Why it Happens and How to Fix it!



Hi!
I have 2 frozen transactions (from 09.11. and 10.11.). Still 0 confirmations. Just 1 hour before I sent the first frozen transaction I sent the transaction from the same wallet to the same address and everything was perfect. As for the frozen ones, first I tried to update my wallet to the latest version - nothing changed. Then I tried "Solution A" - nothing changed. And at the end I tried "Solution B", I installed darkcoin wallet on another computer, did everything else as described, and when I tried to send the raw transaction I got this message:"TX Rejected (code -22)".
Any idea what I should do now??
Regards

 

[alex1010]

Hi!
I have 2 frozen transactions (from 09.11. and 10.11.). Still 0 confirmations. Just 1 hour before I sent the first frozen transaction I sent the transaction from the same wallet to the same address and everything was perfect. As for the frozen ones, first I tried to update my wallet to the latest version - nothing changed. Then I tried "Solution A" - nothing changed. And at the end I tried "Solution B", I installed darkcoin wallet on another computer, did everything else as described, and when I tried to send the raw transaction I got this message:"TX Rejected (code -22)".
Any idea what I should do now??
Regards

 

[bluestride]

I have tried both methods on Nyancoin using Windows 7Pro. First did not work at all. Maybe my skills are nil. The second method my second computers Nyancoin wallet came with "code":-22, "message":"TX rejected".
So it looks that my coins are out of my reach.
If anyone has any other idea, please respond.
Cheers

 

[UdjinM6]

I have tried both methods on Nyancoin using Windows 7Pro. First did not work at all. Maybe my skills are nil. The second method my second computers Nyancoin wallet came with "code":-22, "message":"TX rejected".
So it looks that my coins are out of my reach.
If anyone has any other idea, please respond.
Cheers

Err... Nyancoin?
Well, anyway...
Using console (should be in the program menu help -> console or smth like this):
1. write "listaccounts" and hit enter - this should give you list of accounts and their balances
2. next do "getaddressesbyaccount account_name" - this should give you a list of actual addresses, some of them hold some coins
3. verify if any of addresses have any coins via block explorer (optional)
4. do "dumpprivkey nyan_address" for each address that have coins, save command outputs in text file (this is your private keys, do not share!)
5. close your wallet
6. find your data folder (the one that holds blockchain and wallet.dat) and rename wallet.dat to smth like wallet_old.dat
7. open your wallet, it should start initializing fresh new wallet for you
8. open console again and use private keys you saved earlier one by one - do "importprivkey string_from_text_file" (this could take a long time, so start from the one that have the most coins)
9. when you done your new wallet should have all your coins and no "broken" transactions, you might need to restart it once though

PS.
10. send you nyancoins to exchange, dump them and buy Dash (optional) :grin: