The Great Zero Challenge Remains Unaccepted

An anonymous reader writes "Not even data recovery companies will accept The Great Zero Challenge and only four months remain! We've all heard how easily data can be recovered from hard drives. We're told to make multiple overwrites with random data, to degauss drives and even physically destroy them just to be extra safe. Let's get the word out. The challenge is almost over! It's put up or shut up time. Can you recover the data?"

Comments

000 00 00000 000000000

[MillionthMonkey]

000 000, 0 000 0000 0000000 0 0 0 0000 00000! 000 0 000 000 0000000 000 000000 00000? 00 000 000000!

000 000 00 0000 000.

damn straight!

[larry bagina]

Last month, I challenged every female olympic gymnast to prove she was over 16 by having sex with me. (The age of consent is 16 in my state). To date, every gymnast has ignored me, with the exception of 1 whose boyfriend threatened to kill me. Therefore, we now have proof that all the female olympic gymnasts are under 16 and should be disqualified.

Re:damn straight!

[Anonymous Coward]

You have the same problem the Great 0 Challenge has, your prize is too small!

Re:"....less than a zero percent chance"

[cortesoft]

Nah, you can have a negative percent chance of succeeding in a task. For example, if you have a -5% chance of succeeding, not only will you fail every time you make an attempt, you will also fail 1 in 20 times that you don't even try.

Re:"....less than a zero percent chance"

[antifoidulus]

I've been looking for a slashdot comment that succinctly sums up my life, and now I've found it!

Re:Why Can't They?

[zippthorne]

Read the source.

If you feed it a long string of zeros and don't give it any stopping conditions, it activates the drive's vacuum pump and removes all of the air. This step eliminates the cushion keeping the heads off of the disk, so while "writing" zeros, they're also shaving a layer of magnetic material.

This is more than sufficient to wipe your drive and prepare for a fresh install, unless your drive uses vertical bits. Keep in mind, though, that hard drives are like wood floors. You can only plane them two, three times, tops, before they have to be replaced.