Hi All
Thanks. I suspect if I had have kept this more in my mind and therefore the key safer I would have cashed out much sooner.
I'm turning all my drives over to a friend I haven't seen in about ten years. He runs a PC forensics business and has done successfully for a number of years and became aware of my plight. Said he wants an interesting project if he can help. As it was on magnetic storage at one stage we may have some luck but I still doubt it. So I will not be using them again to minimise any further possible loss or corruption.
It's still going to take a miracle.
Do we know what the main bitcoin client of early 2010 file stucture and private key delimiters as he will need them.
Have a look at following wiki. Maybe it helps.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Private_keyYou have some chances if data is not overridden by new data. Some recovery tools produce good results but data must be unchanged. Maybe instead of hiring experts, you may want to buy full versions of trusted recovery programs and use them on your own. If you tell anyone that you had 600 btc on a disk and ask them to recover, then chances are high that they will say we couldn't find anything but they can run away with your funds if they can succesfully recover your private key.