I wish I'd thought about this when playing with bitcoin a few months after launch and amassing an integer value larger than zero. That wallet died with the hard drive.
Please tell me you still have the hard drive. There’s a chance for recovery, and I have some experience in this area if you want some tips. Step 0 is always keep your drives for future recovery attempts.
It was dumped many, many years ago while BTC was still a novelty paying for pizza in the thousands BTC per. I went to see if I still had a backup of the wallet with a USD:BTC spike a few years back and it was gone.
Think of it this way: by starving the supply of that one bitcoin, you have contributed in some small way to the eventual loss of all bitcoins through similar events - speeding up the rate at which the world can move on from this silly fad.
ddrescue may be of interest if you still have the disk.
That's `dd` for broken disks. It keeps a log of data it couldn't read, and can keep trying to read it indefinitely, it even supports a save state and can resume trying again later.
I've recovered filesystems from several failed disks using it. It's not fast though!
I wish I'd thought about this when playing with bitcoin a few months after launch and amassing an integer value larger than zero. That wallet died with the hard drive.