Can a bitcoin wallet be restored from the files on a drive?

Question

Hard drive crashed and requires professional recovery (likely needs newly built heads by professionals in a clean room). I don't recall what windows desktop bitcoin wallet software I installed and used about 8 years ago.

If I can recover the data files from the bad drive, can those recovered files be used to recover the bitcoin wallet by installing the bitcoin software on a new computer and then somehow copy some data files over from the recovered drive? If so, how would I figure out which wallet software I had and installed / used when I look at all of the professionally recovered files?

Unfortunately, I can't find my backup seed : (

Answer 1

If you used a wallet 8 years ago, you wouldn't have a backup seed phrase (BIP39/44 weren't created until 2013/14). So I have a feeling your timeline is off, or you never had a seed phrase in the first place. But anyways

Without additional info about what wallet you were using:

Generally, you'll want to find a 'wallet.dat' file (or similar), as it will contain the private keys to spend your coins. You will need to either find software that can read the wallet file, or find a way to extract the private keys from the file, and then import them into some wallet software. Private keys are not wallet-specific, but perhaps the wallet file could be. Without more info, it is hard to give specific advice.

Note: Considering the access to your device that the specialists performing the data recovery will have, you may want to consider the possibility of them finding the wallet files themselves. I don't have specific recommendations on how to approach that situation, but it is something to keep in mind.