The Zero challenge

dillingerdan · 9 Sep 2008 at 06:45

Q. What is this?

A. A challenge to confirm whether or not a professional, established data recovery firm 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:

http://16systems.com/zero/index.html

An interesting challenge that I thought I might repost here (I hope this is the correct forum, I am sure it is, and I hope its not been posted). It's a good thing to dispell the myths really. I was a little mislead before, and I admit to posting about something I wasn't entirely clued up on before.

As most people here have said it is theoretical that data is recoverable beyond 1 wipe, so hopefully this gets around and we may see if it can be done.

AbsenceJam · 9 Sep 2008 at 07:30

I posted this in another topic about wiping drives some time ago, once you overwrite something then recovery is not possible. So all you need to do is zero a drive from beginning to end.

semi-pro waster · 9 Sep 2008 at 07:43

Interesting, I had thought it was theoretically possible at least but only if you got down to the level of electron microscopes. I guess overwriting more times won't lead to the data being any less securely deleted, the only problems are the extra time and potential damage to the drive caused.

AbsenceJam · 9 Sep 2008 at 08:04

Theoretically there can be some 'information' left between the tracks on a disk which you could observe with an electron microscope. What you might be able to achieve is to see that one bit from God knows where was a 1 or 0. So further from actual data recovery than theories that cheese will evolve and take over the world.