I've been scouring through my old hard drives to find an old wallet containing some BTC I purchased many years ago, 8-10 years ago approximately. Most were formatted and some were damaged.
After 2 months and searching through 7 old drives, I finally managed to recover what looks like a wallet.dat file using the method outlined in this old thread below. I would have done this years ago if I knew deleted data is possible to recover. But I am not very technical.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/bitcoin-private-keywalletdat-data-recovery-tool-25091Note, I tried several different ways to search for the wallet, and that is the only method that managed to recover something.
Here are the challenges I am facing and need your help to understand if recovery will be possible.
1- This particular hard drive unfortunately was formatted at some point. I have no idea what else it might have gone through, but the recovery tool posted by @makomk managed to recover 1 key, and it generated a .dat file with it.
2- Loading the wallet.dat into Bitcoin Core gives me a corrupt wallet error. Using the -salvagewallet command in bitcoin-wallet.exe did not work.
3- The wallet size is concerning, it is only 16KB. The -salvagewallet tool doubled the file's size for some reason. And after some googleing, I found that wallets are typically 100KB and up.
4- Opening the recovered wallet with a Hex editor I can find some clues that this is possibly the wallet I am looking for. I found sequence 0201010420, but its followed by zeros. Also found the sequence 03 6b 65 79 41 and KeyA, which is also followed by zeros. According to this detailed French guide
https://www.radjaidjah.org/index.php?post/2014/09/07/Sauver-ses-bitcoins-de-la-corruption these are relevant to a BTC wallet. I'm not technical or knowledgeable enough to know whether these sequences are related to something else or not, and this could be something other than my lost wallet.
With all the above in mind, a few questions come to mind.
1- Could this be a partially recovered wallet since the sequences mentioned above are all followed by zeros, file size is too small, and the hex file is generally empty?
2- The wallet is possibly encrypted and hex editor will not reveal any keys?
3- Has the wallet file been partially overwritten?
4- Are there any other methods I can use to rescan and extract the wallet file?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.