Thanks, I will look into it.
The only 2 things that come into my mind are
1. Maybe there was a cross-link and your real wallet data is somewhere else on the HDD - for this you'll have to search on all sectors - used or not - for the magic numbers.
2. The file is encrypted and then you'll have to think harder on what you've done back then. If you would have used Rar or 7zip for this I would have seen their signature, but I don't know what you could have been using...
Yes i thought about that the file could be fragmented and stuff, but i don't have expertise for such kind of forensics.
Some image files that I recovered had this weird-glitchy vertical green lines almost as in VHS video tapes when you fast forward them but they open just fine.
What came to my mind is that eg. Electrum let you specify a password to further encrypt your wallet. May it be that you encrypted it that way?
Its possible but electrum wasn't around at that time, unfortunately.
So whats the wallet balance anyway? Is it worth wasting someones time?
Or you dont remember and there could be a zero on account?
Well I have tried to figure it out. Unsuccessfully.
There was >10btc at some point ( mining was easy, some foucets gave like 1 to 5 btc per claim etc).
If any one knows where i could look up data from 2011 and upwards by broadcast IP address it would help a lot to figure it out