Skip to main content

The Great Zero Challenge

In order to permanently delete data the only way is to destroy the hard drive ?Can we save the Hard Drive for future use destroying permanently the data?Can we recover data from a hard drive that has been overwritten with zeros once?
This is what The Great Zero Challenge is all about.It starts with the line::
It is noble and just to dispel myths, falsehoods and untruths
The challenge is organized by a firm in US named 16 systems and any established, professional data recovery company within USA can participate.Data recovery companies were contacted and the response of one of them was
According to our Unix team, there is less than a zero percent chance of data recovery after that dd command. The drive itself has been overwritten in a very fundamental manner. However, if for legal reasons you need to demonstrate that an effort is being made to recover some or all of the data, go ahead and send it in and we'll certainly make an effort, but again, from what you've told us, our engineers are certain that we cannot recover data from the drive. We'll email you a quote.

And the website quotes-As of September 6th, 2008 the challenge stands unaccepted.Check out the details of the challenge.
The organization (16Systems) have used a new Western Digital (WD800JB) 80GB hard drive with a default initialization and NTFS format from within Windows XP.They have used a Unix dd command using /dev/zero as input to overwrite the drive.You don't actually have to recover any more data to win the challenge, just tell them the name of one of the two files or the name of the one folder that existed in this screen shot before the dd command was executed.
The prize money is mere $500.00 USD (if the challenge is won) but the challenge should be accepted as they say "to dispel myths" because many people believe that in order to permanently delete data from a modern hard drive that multiple overwrites with random data, mechanical grinding, degaussing and incinerating must be used thus lots of good, usable hard drives are ruined in the process.

Links to Check::
16Systems

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

If programming languages were cars...

There have been many comparisons between programming languages and different aspects of human life by many individuals .This is one of them , a comparison between programming languages and cars.This post is inspired from the article originally written by Mike Vanier.This is an update to an old series of jokes about computer languages being like cars. Just go through this list and see if you can come out with your own list of comparisons.Here goes the list... The list Ada is a tank. A butt-ugly tank that never breaks down. People laugh uncontrollably if you tell them you drive Ada, but really, do you want to be driving a sports car in a war zone? Assembly Language is a bare engine; you have to build the car yourself and manually supply it with gas while it's running, but if you're careful it can go like a bat out of hell. Assembly Language : YOU are the car. Basic is a simple car useful for short drives to the local shops. Once popular with learner drivers, it has recen...

T Shirt Quotes related to Computers

Last week while searching for some computer related quotes for T Shirt I came across certain quotes that I thought were very good.So I thought why not share these quotes with you.So here are these quotes,pick the one you like or if you have any of your favorites then do share it with us.Here is the list.. "Programmers don't byte, they nibble a bit" "To iterate is human, to recurse divine" " first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time" "99% of all girls are beautiful, the rest 1% are in my college "ASC!! a stupid question,get a stupid ANS!" "In cartooned form Atom1 - I have lost an electron. Atom2 - Are you sure? Atom1 - I am positive." "There's no place like 127.0.0.1 (“Home” for the non-geeks)" "YouTube(logo) myspace(logo) and I'll Google(logo) your Yahoo(logo)." " I'm a progr...

Google Facts

The name Google is a spelling error. The founders of the site, Larry page and Sergey Brin , thought they were going for Googol .. Googol is the mathematical term for 1 followed by 100 zeros. Initially, Larry and Sergey Brin called their search engine BackRub , named for its analysis of the of the web's "back links." The reason the google page is so bare is because t he founder didn't know HTML and just wanted a quick interface. The company's first office was in a garage , in Menlo Park, California . Google's first employee was Craig Silverstein, now Google's Director of technology. The basis of Google's search technology is called PageRank that assigns a rank to determine how useful it is. However, that is not why it is called PageRank. It is actually named after Google co-founder Larry Page . It would take 5,707 years for a person to search Google's 3 billion pages . The Google software does it in 0.5 seconds. The logos that appear on ...