EGR Delete Info -- Educate yourself

[Johnny5]

I began trucking a year ago as my final career ( financial services for 25 years prior). I decided to buy a truck 2 months ago which was de-mandated a couple years ago by the previous owner. I didn't know what that meant initially but when he told me, it resonated with me since I had egr problems with both company trucks I drove.
Well, my truck quit on me in the middle of the road last week. It was towed to a shop where they determined the ecm was shutting off communication and shutting down. There was a code pointing to a sensor. The sensor was switched out. The truck then ran for 26 minutes before it shut down again.
We have been in contact with the guy who de-mandated the truck. He wanted another 5,500 for programming plus the cost of a new ecm to fix it.
I found a different guy who said to get a new ecm installed and he would run the program for only 1800.00. Since that was less than 5500, I began going down that road. The mechanic installed the new ecm and the new de-mandate guy got online to reprogram. He found the ecm was blank and said it needed to go to the dealer for original programming and only then could he tune it.
That brings me to today. The mechanic took it to the Peterbilt dealer (2013 Pete 587 with paccar mx13 - 600,000 miles). The mechanic told them to use the programming on the old ecm for the new ecm. I was encouraged.
I went to the dealership today and the service writer told me he was going to check with another guy Monday morning, but that chances are they can't transfer the programming from the old ecm to the new one.

I've been out of work now for a week and a half. I have read a lot of the articles on this wonderful site and am getting a feel for what is going on. Still being so new to this I really need help to do the things quickly to get out of this mess and get my truck on the road.
Any of your wisdom would go a long way.
Thanks so much
John