Long story short...I recovered my private key using Pywallet on a formatted hard drive. I loaded the recovered wallet into the bitcoin client and success! it shows my balance. Problem is the passphrase I wrote down isn't working for the recovered wallet. I'm 100% certain that this is the correct passphrase of the formatted wallet as I wrote it down twice in different locations and have used the passphrase before. Anybody have an idea of what's could be going on and how I would go about resolving this issue? Thanks.
You don't even have an issue my friend. Download bitcoin-qt and import the private key into a new wallet. The coins will arrive instantly, the passphrase is no problem if you have the private key.