Wish I knew how to do quoting on here. It seems I've run into a plethora of misinformation out there.
Okay so here is the a link to the post that inferred the idea that I could get a copy of my wallet.dat file from the bitcoin blockchain itself. Scroll all the way down, it's posted by HCP. Post is June 24th 2017
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1976001.0 Wallet ID is mentioned, however there is nothing stating that it's a commercial website not affiliated with bitcoin itself. Again I had literally assumed that it was and that the wallet ID mechanism is thusly part of the bitcoin blockchain. I saw there are timestamps on there. I know when I mined it and how many transactions were going in and out of the wallet, so I had assumed I could narrow down what wallet was mine, along with the IP address assigned by the ISP and thus a rough geographical location. So in a sense, using metadata about the wallet. Look for a wallet matching those metadata criteria, download it, try recovering it.
This page at
https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/commit/ce1862ac6bcffa1dd20aad858380e51e66e949ea#diff-f01f2760502eccb8cb2ede8981e31b82 gave me the idea that if I could remember enough of the passphrase/list of words that I could quasi bruteforce guessing what it is, as long as some of it is already known. It would be known as a salted word list lookup at that point, also a non bruteforce password attack. At this point I had assumed the list of characters that I know I saw but can't remember what they were, was the 12 word, fixed word private key or seed. Unbeknownst to me that it's not possible because the wallet version was too early. So then I wondered that it was a wallet ID.
The UUID was in the directions to something but I'm not sure what, I suspect the directions to using btcrecovery.py. That, a wallet transaction number and some other things were required criteria to find and download the wallet.dat file, probably from blockchain.info. Again this one I don't have eividence of the misinformation.
This thread has no information at all on what versions of the wallet it applies to, so I thought and assumed it meant all of them. There is no indication otherwise
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4959742.0 BIP39 I had no idea what version of the wallet it applied to.
On the aspect of the drive platters, yes I know the only way I could get data off the drive is sending it to a forensics lab and hoping the file wasn't over written. There's also the potential issue that the oxide is failing/failed and flaked off, compromising the signal strength and so on.
I did more reconstructing of various life events during that time period and indeed it was at roughly version .3.12 or so, but definitely before version .4 came out. Also it flagged the lack of SSE2 and fell back to SSE when I mined it.
I've been mining alt coins for the last two and a half years as a side hobby. So I know the importance of making a backup of the wallet.dat file and not just one but two or more, depending on how much you value the coins. Whomever owns the private keys, owns the coins.
Anyone have ideas how else i could retrieve the wallet? I know less about it than probably everyone on here. I've mined the 'forks' but never the original bitcoin except for way back on this wallet. So I do know there is lots of room for various parameters and rules to have changed due them being forks of the original BitCoin project. A different POW algo is one thing that could be changed.
Does anyone know how to calculate how much whatever it mined would be worth? It ran for about 10 hours on an AthlonXP 2800+, well before GPU mining. So for all I know perhaps .0005 bitcoin. I was never expecting to find a million dollars in bitcoin, I've just wondered how much was in there with the assumption it wasn't hacked or broken into. I don't remember the hashrate nor difficulty. I've been reluctant to post this info but it seems currently there is no way to get it back and there is nothing to lose.