Agreed.  There has got to be some ways to boot up such hard drive to see if there are any wallets on there that might have some BTC/LTC... even fragments such as .5BTC might be worth the investigation. 

I am not a very technical peep, so probably I will read that others have responded to your post with better and more specific information, so in that regard, there are likely plenty of technical peeps here or able to direct you to a better thread for discussion of such matters.  Hopefully, you will report back regarding your getting into such disk and inspecting its contents.