aaaw bummer. Sorry to hear that. The absolute best in data recovery that I've run across is a person in Canada. I don't know how quickly you need it up and running but if you want his info let me know. He does quite a bit of data recovery for folks all around the world. If you're looking for someone local, he might also be able to recommend someone.
I'm not sure if I can post the info or link here directly. Let me know if that would be helpful.
And good call on not platter swapping. If you've never done a platter swap before, they can be pretty tricky especially on the 2.5 inch notebook drives.It is also very easy to render the read/write heads useless on both drives if certain precautions aren't taken.
If you also have a drive that is the same Make/Model/Size and with a close enough serial number - which ever data recovery house you look into might be able to use it as a donor.