I have found my old computer from my teenage years in my grandfather's attic after thinking he had disposed of it years ago. I need advice on gaining access to my wallet.

To add to the title -

At some point in 2009-2012, I used to leave my computer on overnight and while I was at school, mining bitcoin. I can't remember how long for, it could've been for a couple of weeks or potentially months. I only remember it was within this time period because it overlapped with me playing Runescape (lol), and I quit playing in 2012 for 10 years or more.

I have sort of moved away from computers although in those days I was interested in gaming and beginner hacking. I was 15-17 and the hacking part is daft looking back at it. But what I'm really trying to say is I used to be fairly computer literate and now, not so much. I've been using macs for 12 years now.

So no matter whether it was a week or several months I left it mining overnight etc. for, there is likely a decent amount of bitcoin on the harddrive.

I don't have access to the email address I used in those years, I lost it about 5 years ago and seemingly can't recover it. ChatGPT tells me this likely isn't an issue as emails weren't used for sign up in the early days.

More advice was to remove the hard drive and back it up on a second hard drive, before opening. Do I have a stab at this myself? How do I do this? Can I plug hard drive into my mac to transfer to a second hard drive?

What if the hard drive was wiped? Would it be in any way possible to recover it?

If I manage to locate the wallet, will I need to remember the password? I believe it was a long set of random numbers and letters so will never remember unless I also have it saved on the computer somewhere.

What are my next steps?

Thank you in advance.