Re: computer crashed and HDD is dead??

No. Electrum also requires the entire data file as do most desktop/computer wallets.

That is just plain wrong. The entire point of HD wallets like Electrum is that the entire thing can be restored using only the 12 word seed. So, if OP's "PASSPHRASE" is 12 words... and he was using Electrum a simple wallet restore is possible.

It all depends what wallet was being used tho.

Electrum isn't a hardware wallet? If I damage my hard drive and lose the backup of my electrum wallet, then I can no access the information from it. As Electrum has no central servers to store the data on it.

Are you thinking of the hardware parts of electrum? If so, then you can definitely restore from them by just plugging them into your computer and putting in the pass code. But the regular version of electrum does not have this.

It's just an executable written in python. https://electrum.org/#download

HD wallets like electrum can be recovered from the seed words without anything on the computer. We don't know if he is using electrum though. From his comments, it sounds like it could be a HD wallet though.

Have I compiled my electrum wallet wrong then? If I try to recover it from anything by my recovery drive then it always creates a fresh wallet (although whether that's a security thing or not i'm not sure).

Anyway, sorry for accidently hijacking this thread in my previous and this response. The phassphrase that he references, is required for bitcoin-qt but I'm not sure that encrypts it as that is written in plain text as far as I know so if it is for core then it will only be useful if the rest of the file is there.