Lost coin or not?

Hello
I feel rather stupid for letting it get to this!

My question is simply can I retrieve my litecoin, peercoin and namecoin.

A few years ago I mined a decent amount of coin and stored them in the ltc main wallet which I downloaded to my hard drive.

I then went travelling for a few years and after watching the bitcoin crash I kind of just wrote them off! Stupid me!!

Now I am on the hunt for them…
The problem I’ve encountered:

Firstly the hard drive is intact… Phew
I can access all parts of the hard drive however I cannot load the operating system from Bios. I’m not sure why yet.
Without loading the hard drive from boot I cannot load up my wallet.

My first worry is where on my hard drive did the ltc get stored?

My second worry is as I have not updated my wallet in such a long time, is there a possibility the ltc have been lost?

I apologise for such a newbie question but I would appreciate any help at this point.

Thank you for listening

Update:
I’ve managed to load a wallet from the hard drive via a laptop. Though the current total is 0.

The block chain is currently 247weeks behind so I am hoping as it updates the coin will appear.

I have also located the .dat file though I am unsure where to move it should the coins not register.

I will keep this post updated

If you can recover the drive without formatting then your good…ive done it before…takes a lot of online searching to fix your exact problem though

If your hard drive is intact, then you should be fine.
Don’t write/modify your hard drive in anyway. Just find wallet.dat files and extract them, the recovery can be completed from a different machine if you have them.
I would suggest you to use pywallet for this.
Let me. Know if you need private assistance. Will be glad to help