The wallet file I deleted along with the rest of it. So, I do wonder that restoring it is even possible. Is there a way without the wallet.dat file? I keep thinking I'll hit a technical wall, maybe this it. If I found the drive, I don't know that I could recover the wallet.dat file from it.
to recover your coin you need something to work on like seed phrase, private key, or dat file
if you don't have wallet.dat file you can't recover your coin
and bitcoin wallet doesn't have seed phrase that you can use to restore your wallet
but if you still have the drive, you may have a chance to restore your wallet file
I'm fairly certain that there was a seed phrase but I can't be absolutely certain. A bunch of random words then?
there was no seed phrase available on old bitcoin (core) wallet,
even current bitcoin core version doesn't provide seed phrase, but only hdseed