Hello,
Back in the summer of 2009, I downloaded Bitcoin and mined very briefly. At the time I had a cutting edge gaming rig and I came across Bitcoin in a new article. I remember mining Bitcoin and it brought my gaming rig to a crawl. After brief period of time and with Bitcoin being worthless, I uninstalled Bitcoin. A decade later, Bitcoin explodes and it made me think if I had any Bitcoin.
I was really skeptical. I tried many many times over the years to find the wallet.dat file and no luck. Maybe my memory was bad.
I very recently found the JakeWins, FindBTC, Github program to search hard drives that have seen better days. I get my computer programmer friend involved and we run FindBTC on Debian Linux. In 2009, I was using a WD 36GB Raptor drive made in 2004. At 73% of the way into the scan it hits a possible wallet.dat file trace.
The possible wallet.dat file is seperated into four parts. FindBTC gives byte offset numbers where the file exists. We use sector editor to open each wallet file in linux. In wallet file 3, if gives the install location C:/Users/.../start menu/bitcoin/wallet.dat. Appearing to confirm that Bitcoin was installed.
The problem is many years ago, I deleted the Users file on this hard drive.
Questions/Help:
1. What type of wording or language is contained in wallet.dat file from 2009?
2. Using sector editor to read the file, can I locate the address within the file?
3. How large should wallet.dat file be typically from 2009?
4. Any programs to recover a deleted Users file from Windows 7.
5. Any programs exist to recover deleted wallet.dat file.
Please see attached images.
https://share.icloud.com/photos/038socKcaDgEvzbr2BgW99twghttps://share.icloud.com/photos/04b2VtgMIusQWUPG8WUcBzzxw