I'm in Dallas. It costs about $5 to ship a hard drive, just make sure there is nice soft foam all around it.
The MBR contains information about the drive. Kind of like a "table of contents". If that "table of contents" is messed up/corrupt, then the operating system (Windows) doesn't look past it, and refuses to recognize it as anything other than a new/corrupt disk ("Would you like to format this disk?")
So, my guess is the data is still on the drive, unless something actually wiped it out, or there is a hardware problem. You can see what is on it with the hex editor. Put it in read-only mode and you can see the filenames.
Normally, data recovery would cost a few thousand dollars. Much more if the hardware is faulty.
-C
EDIT: Oh hey, I had an idea. Have you tried putting it on another IDE controller? Putting it on a USB controller? Reseat the IDE cable?
