Recovering wallet.dat files

Hey everyone, fellow crypto enthusiasts! <3 _______________________________________________________ There's this saying: Instead of saying 'I have a problem,' ask 'What’s the problem?' So let’s kick this off. Back in October 2013-14, I started mining BTC on my old PC running a 32-bit version of Windows. I mined for about 9 months and honestly, back then, it was practically worthless, not in terms of price or anything. But my gut told me it was something special. I even tried to promote Bitcoin at my school, and it was tough seeing people not take it seriously. Maybe that feeling of despair from everyone around me made me give up on this big idea and I just left my wallet file behind... that’s what I remember at least. Fast forward a decade, I hooked up my hard drive to a motherboard with another hard drive and an operating system (basically 2 drives, one with the wallet and the other with Windows, etc.). I thought my old drive was empty of any OS. When I first connected it and used Photorec, I was able to pull all the .dat files and saved them to a flash drive. Then, I tried a bunch of recovery software! I even searched through all the drives when I came across 00053162, but didn’t find any hexes. I did find 00053162 in the header of a sector once, but the rest of the offset string didn’t match up with a Berkeley DB file, or maybe it was just corrupted. I’m convinced that...

That's not true. Bitcoin was worth hundreds of dollars around that time. I highly doubt your old PC could have mined tens of thousands of dollars worth of Bitcoin, as that was the value it had at the time. So your story doesn't add up.

Were your searching that header in hex? Nevertheless, that length is quite short (2^32) so it's not surprising that it'll collide with some random file specially if your drive had a lot of files. Then it's highly unlikely that it contains your wallet.dat file and private keys. Because Bitcoin saves those in its datadir which isn't located where the binary (bitcoin-qt) is installed/downloaded, it's in the drive where the operating system is by default. That's unless you specifically used a command line arg or config file to change to a custom datadir. I'm not sure how can anyone help you after these attempts. Other specific tools like pywallet --recover basically do the same.

IIRC Bitcoin ASIC miner exist since early 2013, while FPGA dominate BTC mining since 2012. So if you mined with PC CPU or GPU, i doubt you mined munch. Have you made a raw copy of that HDD? It's useful to prevent accidentally write on that drive and get as much as raw data you can before the HDD condition become worse (more bad sector or corruption).

As LoyceV already said, the story doesn't add up. Already in midth of 2011 you needed some decent GPU power to mine crumbles of Bitcoin (pool mining, solo mining was already quite out of reasonable reach). "Old PC", lol, definitely not in 2013/2014, even GPU had no chance in that period. Why is OP talking about Photorec and friends? I can't recall in his "story" that files were deleted or does "abandoned the file" means he foolishly deleted something. So much to his strong attachment to his Bitcoin dreams. Yes, OP mentions few(?) read errors or bad sectors on his HDD. How reliable the numbers are is another story. You must be quite unlucky to have the damage at the worst spots to kill your wallet.dat, but shit happens sometimes... 200 bitcoins in 9 months without FPGA or ASIC miner in that period? Nonsense, you're wasting others time here! If your HDD is degrading, the very first thing to do is a forensic image copy e.g. with ddrescue to get as much data off that disk before it further degrades or starts to fail in unrecoverable manners. There are chances that this leads to complete failure of your HDD, be warned. What's the point of mentioning the Pizza Day event? Useless filling of your made-up story. The Pizza Day was in a completely different time and not relevant at all to your stuff. Bitcoin-Qt 0.7.1 was released in 2012-10-19. Not sure why you would run that version when e.g. Bitcoin-Qt 0.8.0 was available from 2013-02-19 and 0.8.1 just a month later (no so important, though). I don't buy your story... Anyway, I don't have to.

Many thanks For who Spend he/she Time for my issue  Ofc there is a missunderstanding , I never said that i Minned all of This btc's BY MINNING . Thats Some of them Buy Via fiat And now Wallet iS missinG or currept or any **** Any Way Ty again And Accept my Apologies For Wasting Your TIME May God BLess u all <3 ... . . . . @LoyceV @nc50lc @ABCbits @Cricktor SOLVED Topic Closed.BTC