P: Photos disappear in my Album, but the number is there I can see the pictures in "All Photos"

First lightroom tried to move the local files on my external drive to my hard drive. Then when I chose the external hard drive, it started writing a copy of the lightroom folders to my external drive, inside my other lightroom folders, since this is what I had chosen. Moving was in fact copying. So not sure what happens but I have no other choice in the resetting program.

Yes, it should not, but it does. Here are two screenshots. First it says it needs to do some housekeeping and at the end goes directly to moving files. No other option.

Resetting preferences should not move the Store Originals Locally location.  Is that the location you are speaking of?

I think I need more information from you about what was attempting to move because nothing should need to move when you reset. 

@Rikk Would have been useful to mention that you need enough disk space so that resetting preferences can move my terabytes of pictures into a new location. Actually it seems that it does not 'move' them but copy them first. I have too many pictures and not enough space. Is there a simpler way other than adding back to this folder one by one, 385 pictures? And over since it happened already once?

If you reset the preferences do you still see it:

Reset Procedure:

1. Close Lightroom.

2. Hold down [Alt/Opt]+[Shift] while restarting Lightroom.

3. Overwrite the Preferences when prompted by the dialog.

4. Close Lightroom.

5. Restart Lightroom.

Here is the screenshot of the empty album I took yesterday. Same today.

Can you provide a screenshot of the Empty Album and the All Photos and the "Folder"?

Lightroom version: 4.2 x64 [ 20210301-0713-6cdd6a3 ] (Mar  2 2021)
NGL Version: 1.24.0.5
WF Version: 3.2 88d676d
Operating system: macOS
OS Version: macOS 11.2.3 (20D91)
Application architecture: x64
Computer model: MacPro6,1 / Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-1650 v2 @ 3.50GHz
Logical processor count: 12
Processor speed: 3.5 GHz
Built-in memory: 65,536.0 MB
Real memory available to Lightroom: 65,536.0 MB
Real memory used by Lightroom: 1,405.4 MB (2.1%)
Virtual memory used by Lightroom: 3,961.9 MB
Memory cache size: 878.3 MB
Internal Camera Raw version: 13.2 [ 738 ]
Maximum thread count used by Camera Raw: 7
Camera Raw SIMD optimization: SSE2,AVX
Camera Raw virtual memory: 497MB / 32767MB (1%)
Camera Raw real memory: 0MB / 65536MB (0%)
Displays: 1) 5120x2880