Issues with opening wallet files

So, I ran out of space on my hard drive and didn’t notice until core started throwing an error, probably due to me accidentally deleting the bitcoin.conf file. I found some copies of settings.json, but they’re all empty, including the main one. I’ve since increased my drive size and resynced after a couple of months, but even though the wallet files are visible, core won’t load any of them. When I try to open a wallet through File/Open Wallet, it just hangs for about 30 seconds and nothing happens. I can see the wallet files in file explorer, so what’s the deal with core not letting me open any wallets?

The wallet files need to be in the wallets directory inside of the data directory. They should be placed in individual folders with the name of the wallet, and the wallets file themselves should be named wallet.dat. Bitcoin Core should detect the wallets once you do that. You can also treat the wallet files as backups and use the Restore Wallet feature instead. Bitcoin Core will copy the selected wallet file to the wallets directory and load it. The original file will be untouched.

Thanks!  I restored wallets and tat did the trick.