Quote from: papercoins on August 12, 2017, 08:12:20 PM

wanted to give an update as to what I did so that if anyone in future that has this kind of problem can take this route. I made an image of the hard drive and tried many different things which were suggested on this forum none of them worked for me. I sent my hard drive the original into a company called secure data recovery they are located in Ohio I believe. They ran a free diagnostics test on my hard drive and gave me a quote of a little under $2000. I pre authorized the charge via a credit card. They gave me a 5-11 business day window to complete the raw recovery. On completion they charged my card and sent me my request file "wallet.dat" via a dropbox. This worked great and must say they did an awesome job highly recommend this company!

Great.

Now make sure that you move the coins from whatever address(es) in that wallet.dat file into a newly created wallet (to ensure that you don't use an older pre-generated address in the old one) so that if there is a copy of that wallet.dat anywhere else, your coins are safe.

Something like Electrum or Bitcoin Core's HD wallet functionality are useful.