I have been trying to wipe free space on an external hard drive and although I know it could take a very long time I always have an issue with the program just shutting down I have the computer set to never sleep so I am wondering why does the program just shutdown and not complete the task It is causing many problems
Are you using ‘Wipe Free Space’ in custom clean, or are you using the Drive Wiper Tool ?
What size is the HDD?
If you are using the Tool then make sure that you only set it to 1-pass.
The multiple pass options are not needed these days* and just repeat what the 1-pass has already done.
So 3-passes will take 3x as long, etc.
*They are there from 15+ years ago when there might have been some point to more than one pass on certaing kinds of drive.