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.
I have already used dumpwallet with pywallet on the recovered wallets I found with a full drive scan. This is a wallet.dat I found in a lost partition by using recovery software. The file won't dump like the other wallets, as I think it is corrupted, and shows as 96kb before using pywallets dumpwallet command. The resulting dumped wallet is only 32kb and says "wallet is encrypted passphrase is correct" but unlike the others it shows only one encrypted private key and nothing else apart from salt and a number. The one encrypted key is a different alphanumeric number to any of the other encrypted private keys I have recovered, so obviously it could be the one I'm after. None of the wallets are usable in the normal way in bitcoin core no matter what command you use as they are corrupted. I have used the passphrase on the other recovered wallet.dats and it shows all the addresses, private keys, mkey etc ie it decrypts the wallets.