Hello all,
I have found an old Windows disk backup, on which there is the 0.3.0 version of the bitcoin client which I <SNIP>
If the old wallet contains anything of value, what should I do next? I gather a cold wallet like Ledger would be sensible, including carefully stored handwritten keyword backups.
<SNIP>
I had similar situation and it turned out some coin generated were not moved for quite sometime.
It is very important to go offline with once you synced to current block height on a new bitcoin core install.
for security and anonymity I would recommend dumpwallet and manually export those address to another machine (because address =public key due to P2PK). Query those bitcoin address using another machine via tor with blockstream or mempool.space to maintain anonymity as these days communication lines are rspan tapped by nation state actors.
If my memory served me correctly dumpprivkey won't work in those early version clients there is a separate process that is required to extract private key value, which I believe someone on this forum will be able to cite earlier bitcointalk threads to better help you with this.