Monday, October 13, 2008

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.
for more information check out this link ....
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