If you were in my shoes, do you think considering professional data recovery service would be an option? I read somewhere that sometimes it is possible to infer underlaying data after being overwritten (it sure beats my simple brain model of a hard drive where you have either a 0 or a 1 recorded in a magnetic plate). If going for that would you still Clone beforehand or just don't touch it any more?
Reading from the disk does not mess with its contents so you're alright with cloning it before sending it off to a recovery firm.
With the current BTC price at $47K, once-measly amounts of bitcoin are now worth fortunes especially given that you got a wallet from 2010. If the amount of bitcoin in the wallet exceeds the costs of a professional data recovery then do it, especially given that 5 or even just 1 BTC is worth tens of thousands of dollars today.
Thanks. I guess the question than becomes what should I ask them to look for specifically. At my current level of knowledge I am still far away to know how to answer that.
Side note: I remember that when I first started messing with hardware, HDs had a combination of pins that would allow a disk to be made read only - not sure if that was a particular thing or a general characteristic.
Cheers