Wallet Recover %AppData%

[Tulips]

Hello BitCoinTalk community,

Boring Intro
I've decided to humbly post a question that I don't believe has been covered before. If it has I fully apologise (I've done a fair bit of reading on how to recover a wallet but am confused at a certain stage). In 2011, I made a BitCoin miner and mined with a pool for a while, but stopped when my HDD crashed upon boot-up all the time (stuck on windows logo forever). It was an ongoing issue with HDD itself and so decided to get a new one. I figured I lost my BitCoins forever and so got cheesed off with the whole thing, but have decided to have a go at recovery. I am using windows 7, and used windows 7 on the old HDD mentioned below.

My problem..
I have managed to use a cradle to get onto the old HDD. I have located the BitCoin folder in F:/program files (x86)/Bitcoin  (It's F: because it's mounted as an external drive). I could not find the Wallet.dat file in the folder on the old HDD and so copied the whole Bitcoin folder over. It still shows the folder creation date as 2011. I read that using the %appdata% will show the Wallet.dat file but this only shows the newly created one on the C: drive (not the old HDD - F:). I tried running bitcoin.exe from the copied folder on my current C:, but my wallet shows 0.0 balance. Is there any way of finding the Wallet.dat file on the old HDD - F: ? Like is it possible to adapt the command %AppData% so that is searches F: instead of C:? Or do I need to just boot up my wallet and wait? (The "Blocks" number keeps increasing?).

Any help would be much appreciated, and I hope I haven't wasted everyone's time if this specifically has already been answered.

Thanks,

Tulips. 

[Foxpup]

%APPDATA% is just a pointer to the application data folder of the currently logged in user on the drive Windows is installed on (which will always be on your C: drive for a standard Windows installation). The folder you're actually looking for is F:\Users\USERNAME\Appdata\Roaming\Bitcoin\ where USERNAME is your user name on your original Windows installation. Copy the wallet.dat file from that folder to %APPDATA%\Bitcoin\ (overwriting the wallet that's already there, assuming you haven't already tried to receive coins with it - make backups of everything if you're unsure) and everything should be good.

[Tulips]

%APPDATA% is just a pointer to the application data folder of the currently logged in user on the drive Windows is installed on (which will always be on your C: drive for a standard Windows installation). The folder you're actually looking for is F:\Users\USERNAME\Appdata\Roaming\Bitcoin\ where USERNAME is your user name on your original Windows installation. Copy the wallet.dat file from that folder to %APPDATA%\Bitcoin\ (overwriting the wallet that's already there, assuming you haven't already tried to receive coins with it - make backups of everything if you're unsure) and everything should be good.

Thanks for this reply, yeah it completely worked, I just had to access the drive I was exploring and then find the user file, I think I was put off that this was the place because it takes a long time to access (permissions etc). If you're willing to reply, do you have any idea how to actually withdraw funds from Mt Gox? I've tried e-mailing them but I can't make sense of a word they say - without wanting to sound like a dick I think it's a bit of a language barrier issue. I tried Bank Transfer but it just keeps rejecting saying they wont trade GBP (even though I requested EUR).