I have now found an old drive where Electrum was downloaded and installed at some point, around 2014.
I removed that drive from my old PC hardware, but I regret that now I should have tried to start up the pc instead. But it can not be reassembled as it broke when I opened it.
Which part broke? I assume you didn't destroy the entire PC.
Is there a way to actually boot up, start up the old Electrum app from the hard disk and then it will itself find its wallet.
Ideally, you'll boot the drive in the original computer. It may work to boot it after installing it in another PC, but, from my very old experience using Windows, Windows is likely to complain hard about missing and found hardware.
Is there a default location for wallets.
See:
On Windows:
Show hidden files
Go to \Users\YourUserName\AppData\Roaming\Electrum (or %APPDATA%\Electrum)[/quote]
Maybe I can make some screenshots of what I see on various searches "Bitcoin" "Electrum" etc to see if anyone gets any good ideas.
I don't know what files Electrum created in 2014, but now (on Linux) it puts all wallets by default in ~/.electrum/wallets/ . Maybe you can search for a "wallets" directory. The files in there don't have any extension.