Just a warning, dont make the mistake of trusting some newbies who PM you and ask you to send them your wallet file. Someone might try to take advantage of your situation although without the passphrase it is hard to get ahead.
I've been on the net since dial-up, that could never happen. Appreciate the concern.
Update:
I am unable to access the file which I apparently saved as a .txt , which I am certain was a text file that I left the passphrase on. I also may have left a private comment on my FB page, to myself, with said passphrase. That is in the early days of BTC tho I believe, back when a lot of people did not believe it would go anywhere. I'm going to check all posts I made from specific years, to make certain. I also seem to recall trashing an HDD due to some , uh, questionable stuff I may/may not have been up to back then. Pretty sure I had a couple wallets on there. facepalming hard here.
What did you scan your drives with? There ate several lowl scanners for tgis
I'm not very well versed on all the different types, I'll admit. What I used was Recuva.
Edit: I'm sure you've all heard this before, but if I managed to work this out with help, I would absolutely compensate whoever. Hard times are upon me, which is what lead me to even bother.
Does Recuva give you an orange or a red mark for the .txt filename? If it's orange, it should be pretty possible to get it back, even within recuva, using the deep search thing and turning on all the recovery settings. If it's red, it's probably overwritten several times by now. The good news is its an HDD so there is no degradation when it's stopped compared to SSD.
Even if it's red, you have a chance if a pro looks at your case with the required gear, or you can learn doing it yourself. Do not plug the HDD again within a computer, you need special gear to make a copy and work from there. In this forum you can asks some data recovery experts:
http://eraser.heidi.ie/forum/I wouldn't bother with bruteforcing unless the password was less than 8 characters without special characters.