So I managed to recover an old wallet.dat file from around year 2011 from an old hard drive (faulty but functioning one). The size of the file is 112KB witch seems normal for wallet files
Unfortunate but it won't load into any bitcoint-qt wallet (tried old ones too), it won't salvage either.
When I open the file it really looks corrupted (not like typical wallet.dat) with random characters all over the place - small snipet of few first bytes in the quote.
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ÞܳÜú鵯ɽeÔu=wÌÙìj}ldÚ[ÒJÞgwQlbyÛ¨[êÜÖÖür¶«$»
¡n5¨@%B¼ï6G$J1¡Û'j¦þdâé8³ÕjdSõ©ÃR{ÂÉ¢:ë8 W*çè}NX7àÆ3þêÅ¡2¶Ãæ¾P@ò8íª¤õMý,« %êé5÷âäV(Ò¦
ãqALàÕÒ}÷ß|àÜûï¾A<æ¡©=>áÌí·½.39Oi·)3!w¶JI1ºÇnß møYÀb¶´u
÷¹µ7WÜ'p)õ*Ö»fö@ôFJm\*¸+à½,õA:5&Kè5 ÆÞóïHiÿ«83 {ΦÞgP!e-"Rgm;¨F¤~ïüGk¬w^úÎ9Úw}
r#mGèø-çy¡5ÆLÀDé¿ÞË >£j¼d{óVÅNõmÓ5¬/_97Q"ÜÆUÜg ]i°fifú-çc*`AÅÞitOM5{>#ú¼µ$L+m ±v·
7:÷Ù£?Ç|¬ãÈ>ÎÃs`öÆ}iűûCö|ûß}÷ß}·Þí»2sè8ËÃ7iæí,Ô4YO³2Lb9ÒtNf¹/I©-@q÷FïfïV£FÅ$|ßì]pO«Cz3,ÂtÜ3aÝ"3ktrPlwÞ}¦N66(MYÑݵz°Î¤¨ÄÅùÝkÈÎ>µFÚS2fcðn³ËW±BBÙõý·¹ÑÔc çIþXÅiàÇL¿ÑTêÒãîã<@/WqÅóñ!YÌÇq¹äÍóÆ·¤¿mû5 ¸¿fî§g$ÜZ´È'/¦£¢tÔ3ûðú´SGð_qbpÌÓþteõô3?ðÍ÷F4ëÄ+$xfòwÈê)]¾ôûï¾/{ï¾û-%}÷wÝßy·}$¤Á©)ox+¦Ýu6`{ÿyçݳï{ÚEFhÝåWçog{3¬~$a åßâ?ªóÄÑ}(Xâe¹ÚMöaVlÑ.¼UCU
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The system at the time was either win XP or win 7, and I'm not sure if the drive was encrypted (probably not because i saw all other files (portion of them was corrupted too) ). There's possibility it was encrypted somehow on top of the wallet encryption ( I was a real smart ass at that time ).
What I tired
- Various tools to extract private like "python keyhunter" and similar
- find some patterns or similarities in encoding with hex editor (manualy)
- search for magic numbers
- Maybe something else
- Tracking the transactions to/from this wallet by full node IP of the broadcast address and date(8/28/2011 last modified) but most trackers have data from 2013
I mean I don't really know how much of the coins left on that address.
So that would be a good start.
If anyone figures out how I could recover rest of the wallet I would share the wallet balance generously