I’m trying to better understand the relationship between a hardware wallet, a BIP39 seed phrase, and the actual Bitcoin keys.
Suppose a user initializes a hardware wallet, receives a 12- or 24-word recovery phrase, and later completely loses or destroys the physical device.
If the recovery phrase is imported into another compatible wallet:
What exactly is being reconstructed from those words?
Are the same Bitcoin private keys and addresses deterministically regenerated?
What additional information might still be required, such as a passphrase, derivation path, or wallet type?
Are there situations where having the correct seed phrase alone would still not be enough to recover the expected Bitcoin wallet?
I’m specifically interested in the Bitcoin/BIP32/BIP39/BIP44 side of this rather than device-specific recovery instructions.












