A hard drive can fail a wipe for many reasons and many factors can be at play. The best place to start in determining what may have gone wrong when wiping a hard drive is to look at the failure reason found at the 'wipe summary' screen within WipeDrive. To view the failure reason for a drive, simply hover the mouse pointer over the row of the drive you're investigating and after a few seconds, a text box should appear with supplemental information for the drive and the failed wiping operation.
The failure reason displayed in the text box can be very helpful in determining the cause of the failure. Messages like 'Unable to write to the drive' can indicate that the hard drive is either locked by a mechanism that WipeDrive cannot overcome, or that the hard drive has errors writing data and no longer operational. Messages like 'Data read from the device was not correct' indicate that during the operation a sector needed to be verified and this data was not correct according to what should have been written on the drive the pass before. This can happen when a sector of the drive has gone bad or the drive experiences errors when attempting read operations.
For Small Business and Enterprise Customers there are options available to you that when configured, will cause a wipe to fail or cancel when certain errors are configured. Options like 'stop on dirty sectors' and 'fail on SMART failure' are examples of options that will cause a wipe to fail as soon as one of these errors are found. These failures can be verified in the failure reason described above.
For additional questions about why your drive may have failed, feel free to contact support.