Trouble finding attacking hash format

[philsmd]

You can find example hashes here: https://hashcat.net/wiki/doku.php?id=example_hashes
The salt doesn't need to be hex encoded, only the hashes are hexadecimal (but you can alternatively still use the salt in hex with the --hex-salt command line parameter).

Anyway, you shouldn't see the error message (even if the salt is "wrong"). The format is

Code:

hash:salt

like you can see in the example hashes wiki page (or with the --example-hashes command line option)
(no dollar signs, no spaces etc)