Help recover wallet after Windows OS upgrade

[FreeMoney]

Someone I know needs help from a trusted member with recovering a wallet. The wallet contains a substantial amount of coin. It may be easy, hard, or impossible, I can't be sure. The fee would probably be contingent. If you think I might trust you, PM me and I'll choose who to put in contact with him.

The jist of the problem is this. He had some system problems (Windows Vista) and a tech installed Windows 7 telling him all of his programs would be fine. Bitcoin was still installed, but the wallet is empty.

[Schleicher]

If he is lucky the old data has only been moved elsewhere.
It should be pretty easy then to locate the old wallet.dat file.
To find all wallet.dat files on drive C: just open a command line window and type
dir /S C:\wallet.dat

[Mushoz]

Shut down the computer immediately and do not use it anymore. Connect the hard drive as a secondary disk to another computer and do a sector by sector dump of the entire drive. Only then start looking for ways to recover the wallet. The more you do right now, the less chance you'll be able to recover anything.

[sega01]

Both of these are good replies. Don't use the drive any more. Mount it as a read/only secondary drive. If you can find wallet.dat, that's great. If not, some sort of NTFS recovery utility might help you get it. Recuva might work, but I haven't used it before.

If you still can't get it, you'll want to dump the partition and have someone else take a look for it. In Unix/Linux you can use dd, on Windows I think it's rawwrite. How big is the partition? You can maybe dump it and compress it at the same time to help cut down on the size (dd if=/dev/sdb | lzop -o file.lzo), for example). Then upload it to someone to take a look at.

Anyone agreeing to look at it should download it to a device which they zero out afterwards, even if they can't find it. Especially depending on how many digits this wallet goes to. If you get the coins back, send them all to a new address so even if they have the wallet, it's all been spent.