Technical help requested migrating from almost 2 year old version of Bitcoin

[LaenDrawoh]

Background:
I had an old Bitcoin account with about 5 bitcoins in it. When I say old I mean the last transaction was dated 8/27/2011 and the bitcoin version I was running was 0.3.24 BETA. The old bitcoin client was installed on an old terabyte drive running vista home ultimate (yeah I know I'm on win7 now this was before it was available). The drive is still in my system as a storage drive and has the old stuff still on it (Though vista blue screens on boot even when attempting to boot it into safe mode).  I was able to run the old client off of this drive but it came up and showed a 0 bitcoin balance... I saw it also said I needed to update my client so I started downloading the current client (It's synchronizing now). I was hoping this would show my bitcoin amount but I am becoming increasingly concerned that I lost them. I tried firing up the old client again (after booting up without bitcoin wallet starting) and it will no longer let me in (It says something about needing to rebuild a database I can get the exact error message if it becomes pertinent). My concern is I am unable to find my wallet.dat file on that drive and I am not sure I had my bitcoin address saved anywhere else. I might have moved the files to my NAS drive I will look there next but my hopes are not high.

Question:
Is there any hope of recovering these lost coins, or should I just start over?

If they are recoverable in some way any advice would be greatly appreciated! When I quit messing with bitcoins the market had crashed and it didn't feel worth my time to reconfigure everything after upgrading my PC... It looks like those bitcoins would be worth about $400 in today's market though, definitely worth messing with again. Thanks in advance for the advise and help!

[LaenDrawoh]

Good news, I had indeed backed up my wallet.dat file on my NAS so hopefully I just have to wait for the new client to finish syncing then import it. BTW sorry for posting this here instead of in technical support but the whole being restricted to the newbie forum thing kept me from putting it in the appropriate place.

[lassdas]

If the last transaction was dated 8/27/2011 there's no real need to finish syncing (to see the coins, sync is of course needed to send them).
Just shut down the client, move your wallet-backup to the data-dir and restart the client with -rescan and if there's coins in your wallet, you should see them.

[LaenDrawoh]

Thanks that worked (though I did have to remove all the blocks I had completed and let it start scanning again)! I haven't lost the old coins so now I just need to let it rescan and I should be good to go again. Thanks again for the help.