File recovery question

If the MBR on the hard drive has gotten mucked up - will Paragon's program still be able to recover the files? I had a friend who's external hard drive was like this and I had not found Paragon's website. Recuva (from Piriform) could not recover the lost files. I remembered a different program that was able to recover the files but thought I might try Paragon's program if it can do this also. I'm basically looking for the best program to be able to recover files no matter what state the files and disk drive are in (so long as the disk drive will spin up). So I am talking about old hard drives that may have bad spots on them, be able to read only partial files, MBR mucked up, and so on. Can Paragon's recovery software deal with these kinds of things or does the disk drive have to be in relatively good condition, MBR intact, and so on. (Like how Recuva needs them to be.)

Thanks in advance.