2TB Western Digital portable drive fails after Spinrite 6.1 runs at Level 5

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Hi friends,

I always run Spinrite 6.1 on all of my HDD's from time to time with
an intention of knowing their health and as a sort of preventive
maintenance.

From the last 4 days, I have been running Spinrite 6.1 on my Western
Digital Portable HDD drive on Level 5 to test its surface.

I run it mostly during the night times and stop in the mornings to
avoid any damages due to vibrations in the surroundings.

Like every other day, I ran it yesterday starting the progress % from
the previous day when I stopped it.

It does not seem to have any problem so far until yesterday. The drive
stopped today. Spinrite shows a screen saying that the drive is
showing a device failure.

I got this same error message 2 days back, after which I stopped the
test, shut down the laptop from which the test is being run, power
cycled everything and after a few minutes restarted again from the
slightly previous position where it showed this error message and it
used to run ok until today.

Today morning it again showed the same error and I stopped everything.
Now after cooling down, I tried starting the test - but the drive is
no more working and being recognized.

What could have gone wrong and what am I missing here. Also is Level 5
ok to run on a HDD compared to Level 4 at least once a year to check
the health of the surface ?

What are your opinions, advice or whatever and is there any way I can
bring the drive back again. It contains some important videos.
Please let me know.

--
Regards,
Surya@Visakhapatnam@India
+9010420462
 
And by the way, I boot into the laptop with SR 6.1 thumb drive, and this Laptop is nowdays exclusively used to test drives. It is an old Laptop and I am using it this way. I have also tested for memory errors on this laptop and it does not show any.
 
Ouch, sorry your drive may have died.

I always run supplemental cooling fans, especially while testing, because HDD longevity may be compromised by heat.

You might remove and clean the drive's circuit card contacts where they connect to the drive itself to make sure there is no oxidation, or corrosion, and try again - cotton-swab and alcohol clean well for me, here's an example of dirty contacts before and after cleaning:

1738717150930.png


However, if the drive were about to fail, Windows, or any operating system, or SpinRite or other tests would have 'used' whatever life expectancy was remaining anyway, good that you discovered the failure before using the drive for data storage again.

That is, the drive data was fully backed up BEFORE testing, right?

As @AlanD mentioned, if you share the Log from the boot \SRLOGS directory, we may see something that corroborates the failure, such as high temperature or a pattern of inaccessible sectors.

.