The Great Zero Challenge
A challenge for data-recovery companies to recover data from a hard drive that has been written with zeros once using the dd command. While the company is very small beans, it would be nice if this was picked up by someone more legit, such as Wired, who could offer more prize money and exposure to the idea.
A challenge to confirm whether or not a professional data recovery firm or any individual(s) or organization(s) can recover data from a hard drive that has been overwritten with zeros once. We used the 32 year-old Unix dd command using /dev/zero as input to overwrite the drive. Three data recover companies were contacted. All three are listed on this page. Two companies declined to review the drive immediately upon hearing the phrase ‘dd’, the third declined to review the drive after we spoke to second level phone support and they asked if the dd command had actually completed (good question). Here is their response… paraphrased from a phone conversation:
“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.”