Hdd mbr

I have an HDD that has a zero sector error, I think this refers to the MBR. What happens is if I try to boot with the drive, I get the click/slam noise as the reader arm tries and fails to locate the MBR. I have tried freezing, and other steps to no avail. There is a visable scratch on the top disk in the drive. I have "unstoppable copier" and am wondering how/if I can use this to get my pertinent data back. The only thing I really care about is family pics and videos which I stupidly didn't back up.
The HDD in question is now sitting on my desk, and I have an SSD for my O.S. and 2-2TB HDD's for games, movies, pics and programs.

Home built rig, by me almost 3 years ago:
Asus P6t MOBO
Asus HD 7770 Video card
12 GIG corsair memory
Intel quad core I7 chipset
Steel series keyboard

Thanks in advance for any help.

 

If you can see a visible scratch on the top disk then that means you've opened the drive, which makes it worthless now. These drives were sealed in better than hospital operating room cleanliness. Your drive is just about shot to hell now.

 

Booboo is right about the cleanliness during assembly.
But the information may be salvagable if you really want it. There are plenty of hard drive resurrection companies around. The problem is, they are not cheap.

If you really want the data, stop what you are doing and carefully wrap up the drive. Contact a hard drive data recovery place and let them work on it.

 

Booboo is right. Drive platters are made and drives are assembled in "clean rooms" to ensure not one spec of dust gets in. Then drives themselves are sealed with only a tiny micron-filtered hole for pressure equalization.

If the drive was good, it is no longer.

And BTW, the freezer trick rarely ever worked and when it did, it was questionable if freezing actually did make it work. And even then, all it did was harden the grease in the motor bearings to hopefully, unseized the bearing so the motor could spin long enough to retrieve a small handful of critical files before the bearings seized again.

Sorry, but what you should have done (besides keep multiple current backups), is try running chkdsk /r or the drive maker's diagnostics on the drive to repair the boot sector and file tables. If not successful then maybe a decent file recovery program.

Now your only option is, as DOA suggests, to take/send the drive to a file recovery service where they will disassemble the drive (in a clean-room environment) and forensically analyze the platters and attempt to recover any recoverable files.

But understand this service can cost $100s and even $1000s as it takes very sophisticated, specialized (read: expensive!) equipment and highly trained technicians considerable amount of time. And even then, the success rate is nothing like depicted on TV.

Out of curiosity, was this drive dropped? Assuming you did not scratch the top "platter" during disassembly, the only way it could have been scratched is by the R/W head scraping a Grand Canyon size gouge (microscopically speaking) across it. And the R/W arm is designed to "float" the R/W heads just a few microns above the platters, never touching them. So unless the R/W arm mechanism suddenly broke on it's own causing the R/W head to crash into the spinning platters, which seems unlikely, it would appear some other forces were involved - like gravity and an immoveable object (such as a floor).