Hello everyone let me get straight to the point.

I am using Kali Linux attempting to crack a password and recover the plaintext password. The first machine the one I need the plaintext password from is a windows 7 home premium OS. I mounted the drive on my machine and was able to get the hashes. Or was I? Now here is the issue. I have been attempting to crack this NTLM hash for days to be able to recover the plaintext password. I know something is wrong. What ive done so far is Boot the Windows 7 hdd and mount on linux, Use samdump2 /location/of/system and /location/of/sam >/home/kali/hash.txt

Now the hash is NTLM the first part is the USER, second part is number, third part is a blank LM hash and the fourth part is an NT hash, it looks something like this.

User::1000:aad3b435b51404eeaad3b435b51404ee:45076b3d0847ae6212e38b2896ac3c05:::

(Dont worry ive changed a couple letters/numbers from the second part) So from what i was told is that the first hash is a BLANK LM hash, ok and the second part is a NT hash correct? So now when i am trying to crack the hash and get the plaintext password with the john the ripper and i use the command

john --format=NT -fork=4 -w=/home/kali/wordlists /home/kali/hash.txt

the output to that command is

Using default input encoding: UTF-8

Loaded 1 password hash (NT [MD4 128/128 AVX 4x3])

No password hashes left to crack (see FAQ)

Ok so now when i try to get the plaintext password i use the command

John --show --format=NT /home/kali/hash.txt the output i get is

User:1000:aad3b435b51404eeaad3b435b51404ee:45076b3d0847ae6212e48b2896ac3c05:::

1 password hash cracked , 0 left

Where is the plaintext password? Ive checked the potfiles and the only thing thats in there is something that looks like this

$NT$45076b3d0847ae6212e38b2896ac3c05

even used hashcat and the same thing. Now the funny part is even with a password that i KNOW the password is in the wordlist for example lets say the password is "password" and i know its in the wordlist, it still gives me this BS about the hash being cracked and i cannot find the plaintext anywhere. What am i doing wrong? Did i correctly dump the hashes from the machines? Does "cracking" a hash mean getting the plaintext password? I have been stuck on this for about 2 weeks now. I have been trying for multiple hours a day, trying to crack this password, and even tried cracking a password which i KNOW the password to. What am i doing wrong? Any tips/suggestions, and YES IVE TRIED GOOGLE/ ive read forums about John the ripper and hashcat ive read about countless different attack modes, potfiles, wordlists, incremental modes etc. Please anyone with experience of successfully cracking a password help someone out, and I KNOW ABOUT CHNTPW, my goal is to CRACK THE PASSWORD. sorry if i am allover the place Let me write a couple questions i need answers to.

1. Is cracking a hash, recovering a plaintext password from it?
2. Is an NTLM hash, two seperate hashes? First part is a blank LM second part is the actual NT hash? Do i just focus on the NT part of the hash?
3. When using john the ripper and it says 1 hash cracked, 0 left what does that mean, does that mean that you are able to aquire the plaintext password? using the -show command or -potfile
4. How do i know if ive got a valid hash from using samdump2 [system] [sam] file
5. How is it possible to bruteforce offline with just the hash?
6. What am i doing wrong?