I have a wallet.dat file that I recovered from a hard drive using recovery software. I ran pywallet through it, and all it showed was one encrypted private key and a salt and I knew the correct passphrase, which I used . I have also used pywallet on the full 400G drive, and all those recovered files found by that method have included address, public key, master key etc. The lone encrypted private key is different to any of the ones found by doing the full drive search.
why make it so hard?, you have a wallet.dat file, if you have that password, you can easily get the private key by
dumpwallet command on the console. You also don't need to sync network or download the full blockchain for that.
The lone encrypted private key is different to any of the ones found by doing the full drive search.
I guess it's not bitcoin's private key.