[michaelt]

Back in ~2008 someone ran what they called "the great zero challenge" promising a prize to anyone who could recover data from a (60GB mechanical) hard drive after dd had overwritten the drive with zeros once.

The prize wasn't large, but the challenge got pretty good coverage on tech news sites, so it would have been good PR for any data recovery company.

Nobody accepted the challenge. I think recovering such data is impossible, and I'd be fascinated to be proven wrong - if you know anyone who could do so?

[gens]

Apparently the NSA would. (somewhere around the shredding part; don't have time to find exact)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bpX8YvNg6Y&feature=youtu.be