Hi all
New to the forum and wasn't even sure where to start with all this!

I'm in search of some information on bitcoin retrieval from the early days. I'm pretty noob!

Back in the period of around late 2010/early 2011 I used to frequent /g/ and other online IT forums and there was a bit of a buzz around bitcoin at the time in these small communities. So I decided to give it a go myself. All I remember at the time was jumping onto a mining client and leaving the computer running overnight. My memory of the time is very vague and I don't remember setting up everything specifically, just that I would leave it on overnight to mine then stop it in the morning. I probably did this for maybe 2 weeks, possibly more, then decided it wasn't doing much for me. Maybe 6 months later my hard drive stopped working, wouldn't spin up and it's been sitting in dry storage since. So 10 years or so.

I wouldn't mind trying to see if I can get a professional data recovery done on the drive and see whats happening on it. I don't even remember if I did a wipe and reinstall at some stage but I doubt it. What's the chances of finding meaningful bitcoin data? I have no idea what my private key is, whether I stored it on there or not. Or if it's possible that it's stored on the mining client? I never "cashed in" any coins, just mined and left it. I'm sure I would have linked it to a wallet? Any advice guys? Is it lost forever?

Cheers