Evening, looking for some help after days of trying to recover my wallet.dat file.

Heres the story, litecoin acquired 2017ish, backed up on HDD, i accessed this again in 2021 using Litecoine Core.
HDD failed recently and a local company has recovered as much as they could to a new drive. Some photos and videos wont open (presumably corrupt) but majority saved.
The location i saved my Wallet.dat file is accessible and ive got 1 file that is 1400kb (Im pretty sure this is the LTC) and a few other copies and maybe one stratis wallet that all show 88kb.
I downloaded LTC core and after fully synchronising tried to load each wallet.dat file, all of them deliver the same message.... 'error:  Failed to load database path 'c:\users....' Data is not in recognized format'
Ive tried my best over the days to use pywallet and IF i did it all correct pretty much came away with no keys found.
I did put a password on the .dat file which i know.... however when using pywallet no matter what password i put in it said, file is encrypted, password is correct..... so presumably i did something wrong there.

Thanks in advance for your help, happy to negotiate a bounty if you wish but theres not an awful lot on these, enough to bring me here though!