Just take care when transferring the flash chip to the new board. If you destroy the chip, the recovery probably will cost a lot more.

Soldering the ROM from patient to donor is absolutely no problem for me. My Main Job is Electronic Engineer and i own a very large video-game collection, there are a lot of things that must be soldered

But thank you for the warning. I didn’t talk about my skills so far

Before changing PCB you may try to connect the drive to a serial port adapter. If the PCB is OK, the drive should answer to VR or VM command (it may takes some time) and report a FW version slightly different to one printed on the label ( one character changed).

I can check it If you give me the advice where to get/build a serial adapter.