I invested in bitcoins at the beginning of 2015. At the same time back in 2015, i installed Electrum wallet and somehow an offline version which meant that I stored the bitcoins on the computer's hard drive, this offline version was not something I wanted, it just happened by a mistake. Once the bitcoins were sent to my Wallet, it took about 3 days until the hard drive crashed.
A good friend managed to get into the hard drive via the wrong safe mode, and ran a backup of all important files, including the files to Electrum, including my wallet.dat file, which I have understood is a relatively important file.
I bought a new computer and downloaded the files from my backup and tried to restore my wallet, but I could not solve this.
An error message appeared when I tried to access / restore Electrum. When I tried to open the wallet file in a program called something with HEX, (which people had written about in diffrent forums), it stod ”the file is corrupt” according to the program.
I let it all go and more or less forgot this until now. I have read and i was thinking, could the reason why the file apears to be "corrupt" , just because its encrypted? I know the password for the encryption and I have just finally finished syncing the Bitcoin core. But i dont now how to decrypt it, and is my idea about the file issue, possible?
What is my next step to recover my bitcoins?