I was an early adopter. I never used the Silkroad or anything like that. I just liked collecting odd things. I bought 50 btc from a friend back in 2011 and just kept them in a private wallet since.
Well that Hard drive is now dead. I've been sporadically trying for years to get it to work. I'm at a total loss here. The market is at an all time high, and Im not sure another bear market is coming back.
I never had money to invest in this in the first place. But what little I did have I would throw into MTGOX (lol) and lost that shit too. After the GOX incident I took a couple years off of cryptos. I still had my private wallet I thought, until I went to retrieve it in 2015 and my hard drive was compromised somehow. I have 5 mill RDD/ 5 mill DOGE and 50 btc on that drive.
Now it's at an all time high again and I am still broke. What am I doing wrong?
If you are practical with your hands then do what i did when my hard drive stopped working 10 ish years ago.
In a clean room with no dust.
1. Buy a cheap second-hand working hard drive and must be the same model as your dead hard drive.
2. Remove both hard drive casing.
3. Remove the disc platters from your second-hand hard drive.
4. Very carefully remove the disc platters from your dead hard drive.
5. Very carefully put the disc platters into the second-hand hard drive.
6. Make sure it is done properly.
7. Put the casing back together.
8. Connect the hard drive to your computer and pray to god that there is no damage to your disc platters. (most hard drive failures are mechanical)
9. Retrieve all data (wallet.dat first) you want to keep and copy them to another brand new hard drive. (I am assuming you have one already)
10. Start Bitcoin and check the wallet is ok.
11. Make multiples copies on at least 2 different storage device. Keep 1 and store the other with someone you can trust i.e your parent. This is just in case your house has the misfortune of being burnt down.
Let me know if that works.