Why re-solder the chip? It seems as though it would be easier to recover data by just yanking the drive, especially since full-disk encryption was quite rare fifteen years ago. Failing that, couldn't you have used a SPI flasher with the existing chip?
To a teenager with only a passing experience with electronics, operating a soldering iron is much easier than learning to flash an EEPROM :-)
And I only had one working, locked laptop and a broken one. The whole endeavour was mostly to inherit my father's laptop than to recover any data. What I did with my father's data is probably a story for another time.
