Hi all! A coworker's laptop stopped working and she asked me to look at it. I determined that the 250GB Toshiba MK2552GSX is the problem. She bought a new drive, I put it in, goodness ensued for the laptop. Unfortunately, she has all her photos on the old drive (naturally) not a single backup. Here are the drive specs that I have:

Toshiba
Disk Drive MK2552GSX
HDD2H02 S ZK01 S
S/N Y8A7F6B2S CR4 EC.A
250GB (LBA 488, 397, 168Sectors)

On the PCB
FFB8XKEL2
FKN6VB
A5A002217010 [A]

On ring
001H01000
TOSHIBA
08434K

Symptoms:
When connected to power, the drive spins up normally with no ticking or scraping and no abnormal vibrations. When actually being accessed for data, you hear ticking. Windows 7 would timeout before the drive showed up in Computer or Disk Management. From a Win7 boot disk, I began a chckdsk, and it was running, but EXTREMELY slowly... it took around 15 minutes to even acknowledge the disk was NTFS. At this point, I realized going further may just be causing damage, so I stopped everything.

I called 2 professional recovery companies here in the UK, and the price quotes began at 500GBP and went up. This is beyond her price range, so I took to the forums. I've been reading that sometimes this type of failure could be the PCB, so I bought a cheap working drive off Ebay that is the same. I understand that the EEPROM holds disk specific information that must be transferred to the donor PCB, but I've been reading as well that it may be combined in another chip on the board? I've attached a picture of the PCB. I think the IC that needs to be swapped is IC602 on the right. The markings on this chip are as follows:
MX
L083223
MX254005
LZNI-12G-G

So here are my questions:
Given the symptoms, is there any simple other method I should use to test this drive that I can try (I am quite computer literate, but not anywhere near a component guru).
Is IC602 the correct chip? If not, which chip is the correct one for the transplant?
Can anyone recommend a place that can swap the chip for me in the UK, or maybe what to search for to find one? I don't have the skills for soldering and don't want to ruin the chip or board by being a moron, but looking on google for chip soldering gets so many hits I'm not sure how to narrow it down to something this specific...

Thanks for any help you can offer!

You PCB is not at fault.
You have to refer to a professional in order to recover data.

pcimage is a reputable member of this forum and can help you out for reasonable price.

_________________
www.datarecoveryne.com

Totally agree (on both points).
Your pcb is fine. Ask pcimage for help.

_________________
http://www.northwind.gr
SandForce SSD Recovery
Ransomware Reverse Engineering - NoMoreRansom! partners

Just thought I'd drop a quick thank you. I contacted pcimage and turned my user on to their services. Who knows if she'll ever follow through, but thanks all for the recommendations