The first thing I'd do is use software which allows you to make quick searches on the drive, and I'd look for "wallet.dat".
There's one step before that: create a disk image, backup the image, and only work on the image.
From my experience, relying on your 14 year old disk to not have written on top of your private keys, usually doesn't go well.
Indeed. A computer easily writes many terabytes per year to it's disk when you use it. This makes it very unlikely to find back the sector you're looking for.