I got some bitcoins back in 2011. Recently I found the old HDD where I put the wallet.dat file. The HDD had been reformatted several times and used as the system disk (drive C:) for several years.
I followed the instructions in this post: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2857580.0 and made an image of the disk and searched for 308201130201010420 with WinHex. No results. (I have tried to search for other values to make sure I'm doing it right.)
So, is all hope lost? Is there any other way where I can try to retrieve my bitcoins, or should I just give up?
Thank you very much.