Old wallet help

I've searched and most posts are for wallets with seed phrases, which doesn't apply here.

Back in 2011, when I was done playing WoW for the night, I'd flip on a pool mining program to mine this cool revolutionary currency they called Bitcoin. Sometimes I'd end up with 0.6-0.8 BTC per night. It was neat, was worth real money, something like $5. Ended up selling a bunch when it hit $10. Boy do I regret that.

Just this week, I'm going through a box of old hard drives, checking their contents, I see a Bitcoin folder. My heart stops. There's a wallet.dat. Ngl, been researching on how to recover this wallet for 2 days now and I get a "wallet is corrupt" message when I try to import. I have the whole folder with a bunch of other files (.lock, _db.001-006, bunch of .dat files and the wallet.dat).

My Bitcoin Core is synchronizing to the blockchain, currently 6 years to go. I've freed up 120GB of disk space just in case. Do I need to wait until it's synced up before I try importing the wallet.dat file? I've already backed it up in a few different places. I doubt there's more than 10 BTC if any but I need to know. Any advice would be so appreciated.