how to tell if possible wallets returned by pywallet --recover are real wallets?

[LeafyBridge]

I am trying to recover any possible bitcoin wallets by scanning my hard drive which may contain or did contain backups e.g. raw disk images of hard drives I used to run bitcoin a long time ago (around 2010).

I may also have the physical HDDs still but I don't have time to examine them now and thought I'd go for the easier option of downloading pywallet and using the recover option to scan my current hard drive.

I ran
sudo ./pywallet.py --recover_size=3666Go --recov_device  /dev/dm-3 --recov_outputdir /home/myusername/recovered_wallets

Which gave the output
'Found 3 possible wallets
Found 0 possible encrypted keys
Found 0 possible unencrypted keys
The wallet is encrypted and the passphrase is correct

Importing:

The new wallet /home/myusername/recovered_wallets/recovered_wallet_somenumber.dat contains the 0 recovered key'

The hard drive as well as containing old backups also contains a current installation of bitcoin-core-22.0 and the associated wallet.dat so I would expect pywallet to find this and that at least one of the three would be this one.

However when I do
sudo ./pywallet.py --recover_size=3666Go --recov_device  PartialRecoveryFile:/home/myusername/recovered_wallets/pywallet_partial_recovery_somenumber.json --recov_outputdir /home/myusername/recovered_wallets

and use the known wallet passphrase for the new bitcoin-core wallet (the password I use to unlock my wallet from the console window of bitcoin-qt of bitcoin-22.0 by walletpassphrase) it shows the same followed by

Possible wallet #1
     with passphrase #1

Etc.
And still

Importing:

The new wallet ... contains the 0 recovered key'

So I would like to know if these wallets are actual wallets or not (at least one of them should be!) and if so how to find and use them.

I thought maybe to find the files from the partial recovery JSON file so I can maybe know if they are interesting or not?

Many thanks.

I have also taken the generated recovered wallet and after moving the original wallet.dat to a safe place (it doesn't contain any coins anyway now) I replaced it with the recovered wallet. However on attempting to load the wallet it gives the error message  'Wallet loading failed: Unable to generate initial keys' I'm guessing because there arent any keys there.

P.s. I am using fedora Linux 35 and bitcoin-22.0 full (unpruned) node.
https://imgur.com/a/rYWQVbG

[jackg]

Potentially stupid question: have you actually generated an address in the one wallet you suspect to exist? It's possible (and potentially likely) you've just found three empty wallet files (or one empty wallet and two that are too corrupted to be used and recovered by pywallet.

[LeafyBridge]

The new 'test' if you like wallet was created using the bitcoin core 22.0 bitcoin-qt GUI by choosing create wallet with encrypt wallet and otherwise default options except I chose make blank wallet. I did however add a number of private keys after this using the importprivkey command from the console and choosing window receiving addresses from the GUI shows 9 addresses.