MBR/disk read error problems

I'm working on a system using an ATA-2 LBA drive that is giving the following errors:

1)disk read error, press ctrl+alt+del to restart

and when run through vista scandisk in my pc:

2) the master boot record may be damaged, the disk is unrecoverable

and when run through chkdsk at the windows recovery console gives:

3) the disk has one or more unrecoverable errors.



I've basically concluded that this drive is likely going to take a lot of work to get back into usable functionality, but what was more my concern was getting the data off of their hard disk and onto another one.

I've read that sometimes when it states master boot record errors, it doesn't actually have them and that there are utilities which can recover the damaged files from the file table.

Does anyone know of the best utilities for attempting this type of recovery, i've heard of it being done, however i've never had to actually do it myself before.

One time I have had a similar situation with my brother's hard drive. It turns out that alot of the system files in the hard drive is corrupt and not a hardware problem. I put the hard drive into a usb hard drive enclosure, ran a thorough chkdsk (scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors) and reboot the computer to allow to get rid of the bad sectors and such. Afterwards, I was able to recover the files.