Hello,
I'm aware the forum is probably awash with these type of posts, so i sincerley apologise for another. i've spent a few weeks trying to possibly recover bitcoin wallet from mining in 2009 but hit a dead end, so i've come to ask for advice.
So to explain, I mined bitcoin propbably early 2009 for roughly 2 months, before thinking it was not really worth leaving the pc on and called it a day. This was on an old pentium 4 pc desktop, nothing great. I left the country oct 09 and left my PC with my friend and said he could use it until i returned. Upon returning 2011, he had wiped windows xp and put on win7 OS.
I got the pc back, but it packed in and i never used it again.
I never had any interest in cryptocurrency until last year, and recently saw a thread on reddit explaining that even with a formatted drive, that it's possible to recover deleted bitcoin wallet.
So i got the old hdd out and bought a sata 3 caddy.
Then as i read was advisable , i cloned the HDD booting my windows laptop into a Linux ubuntu usb boot key.
I used ddrescue and saved the cloned drive image to an external.
I have searched for wallet.dat and don't see anything from a standard search or browsing to app data. I think i need to recover the deleted xp formatted part. If this is not possible and it's simply gone and it's toast, then fine, i just move on.
I managed to figure out how to run testdisk and found lot's of deleted stuff but so much came back i had no idea what to do with it all next.
Then i tried to follow the instructions from this thread to use keyhunter.py
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/walletdat-hex-code-in-2009-2857580 .....but this is where i am stuck, i do not know Linux, nor am i good technically with computer code like this...So i couldn't get it to work.
I mounted the cloned hdd image, but no idea how to use keyhunter.py it said to make it executable - no idea.
Then i went back to windows 10, cloned the hdd once again using EaseUS software ( windows wouldnt open the Linux created image file), mounted it which created it as Local drive (Z)
Then i ran R-studio and followed this guide
https://www.disktuna.com/recover-lost-or-deleted-bitcoin-wallet-dat-using-r-studio/The script wallet.ini filled raw data files as suggested to use in that guide came back with various wallet folders with a total of 39 dat files - probably nothing looking at it, none were marked wallet.dat. I still haven't recovered any potential formatted data though.
Edit **the search using wallet.ini that came back with 39 files - i used a program called DMDE.
So is this just toast and chasing btc ghosts or is there something else i could do ?
Cheers
