wipe free space made drive unbootable...

[james009]

To anyone using this software with windows 11, DO NOT use wipe free space. It has made my secondary HDD (western digital 1.5 TB) unreadable and will not post to bios.

 

Upon restarting the next day the drive stops at bios and says 'please backup, imminent disk failure on drive'.

 

Only disconnecting it will allow me to boot into windows 11, but I fear Ccleaner has BRICKED this drive. I am so angry for using this product...

[nukecad]

The error message says that your drive is failing.

How old is the drive, how much use has it had?
How often do you run a drive wipe?
How many passes do you use  when wiping?

• Doing a drive wipe too often and/or with multiple passes WILL shorten the life of a drive.
• Drive wiping is not something that you should be doing on a regular basis.
• Drive wiping will not make your computer run any 'better'.
• Drive Wiping is meant for use if you are selling or giving the drive to someone else so that they won't be able to recover any deleted files from it using recovery software - there is no reason for running a drive wipe other than to prevent the possiblity of recovery.

Drive Wiping writes thousands of 'junk' files to a drive to totally fill it up, then deletes them all again.
That's a lot of writes.

Drives do have a finite lifespan of writes and do 'wear out' with use. No Equipment lasts forever.
Some drives will fail after less writes than others.
Even big-name drives can be 'faulty' and wear out much more quickly than they should.
When they do fail then you replace them just like you would with anything else that wears out.

At one time they would just stop working, but nowadays your computer recognises when it's happening and gives you that warning message so that you can back the drive up before it fails altogether.
Unless you want to lose the data on the drive then do as it says- stop using it and and back it up.

Once you have it backed up then as a last ditch attempt you can run a chkdsk on the drive to see if Windows can repair it, but that's unlikely if you have simply used up it's life. if it's life has ended then it's time to replace it.
To do a chkdsk:
Once you have the drive backed up then Open File Explorer and go to This PC to find the failing drive.
Right-click on it, choose Properties, go to the Tools tab, click Check, click 'Scan drive'.