Short of imaging by head and writing off the first head worth of data, how do you guys deal with drives like this? Especially in cases where the primary SA is damaged so even with a head transplant the heads just kill themselves again?

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

Hy drccsc , we got similar case, we tried head exchange, but was not possible the still´s knocks, on my case was similar like u but over land zone had a head crash, too, u should be check dust inside too, to know if its magnetic dust, before tried something , but unfortunely on seagate with head crash on that zone, surely could kill u donor heads and with low hopes

Regards

It's a Seagate drive. after transplant the head(new) will be dead also.
For the case, i m not still succeed. SA at the final track of the platter.
If the SA area scratched, then there might have solution like STT - I m not familiar.

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I can't see a picture very well.
If that is a gray dust I can see inside a casing, it won't be possible.

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Just for the sake of science, let's say it is not gray dust. Would you then expect to be able to image the drive without killing the new head?

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

I can't see a clear picture.
In any case. If there is a damage to the platter, you should expect heads dying, but getting as amuch as possible from each approach.

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If u got a scratch on side 1, maybe u got same scratch from side 0 too

With rings like this there is not much you can do from what I understand; this is because when a disk initializes it ALWAYS does a quick sweep over the whole platter surface, so avoiding any ring is basically impossible. Crashing is inevitable.

the only thing you could hope for is that there is no ring/ platter damage to side 0, and you could attempt to only read data from side 0 and see what you get.

I have a theory,
Not sure how it would work in reality. but how about increasing the space between head and platter and increase magnetic state by changing the voltage. You could first depop that head and image the rest, and there after play with the voltage and space between head and platter.

Besides the PCB, and preamp circuitry not being able to take a sustained higher voltage, let alone a surge, im not sure if the increased voltage would actually benefit the signal, or just introduce more noise. If anything you would need to actually make the preamp amplify the signal even more then it already does and that may increase the distance that the heads can fly at and retreive data.

I'm no HDD engineer though, just theory