Quote from: axloisio on October 18, 2024, 10:52:14 PM

I formatted this hard drive at least twice and used it for a few years. I thought I had lost it, but when I moved I found it stored in a box.

I hope that you're working on a disk image or restored backup of the drive instead of the original.

Quote from: axloisio

I tried searching for the hex string "fd1701308201130201010420'', but no luck, I don't know if this prefix covers wallets from early 2010 or if all wallets contain the prefix 04 20 preceding a private key.

I have a for-test-only wallet.dat created with v0.1.3 and the consistent "magic number" before my private keys are: 0x01130201010420
But that's a few months older than your target version;
however, as I've mentioned: there's nothing much changed in the magic number of old and newer versions of legacy wallet.dat files.

Test wallet dump:

Code:

"keys": [
{
"addr": "19NTMqGi3FCxqEzvhimnr77HmHpmRFs9ba",
-snip-
"secret": "6d4b2e44229ec5b6453fa199e2f66a6fddb2bee5c0754096f0625ebc7c1adde8"
},
{
"addr": "1AwHLeDPncY8H7rcmGzfzRsDxiX7PUrJhA",
-snip-
"secret": "7b2ae95f74070bc1d7f5299b08e8184dc0d8dbc57d78c0b4b1a7871b8401c5b6"

Some screenshots (same prvKey above):
1.

2.