Honestly, I don't really fancy your chances... an XP machine that was reformatted to Win7 and then "used" for up to 2 years afterwards?
Particularly if the friend nearly filled up the hard disk with data, or maybe even half of the hard disk. In those cases, the wallet bytes won't even be on the raw image, and you'd have to use some specialized tools to see if you can read the original (unencrypted) bytes.
It was pretty clean not many files, it was used mainly for work accounts/ quotation after formatting but i don't think the existance of any wallet.dat remains - i found and recovered a few long lost photos from the xp data and thats about it. Time to move on, the btc will just have to remain where its been since 09.
Really like to say thanks to everyone who took time to give me some advice and tips to help. cheers
