External HD not showing up in local drives folder

I have researched this query endlessly over the last few days, and I see unanswered forums, and confusing responses from the adobe community based on the topic.

I find this to be a completely random occurrence, and right now it's totally messing up my project workflow.

I am trying to link recently transcoded proxies to my footage. and my external Hard drive is not showing up in my selectable local drives. It shows up in the other window to the right. but if I use the search option, It begins an endless stream of searching through my Main Hard drive, and literally never makes it to my external. butt he main window on the left, the list view one, my external is not showing up.

I have mounted and unmounted. I've tried unlinking and re-linking, and even re-linking the fooage, I can't do bc my drive is not showing up in the list view.

so I can't navigate to where my proxies are. I've noticed I can't  even search the drive through media encoder. and for years of working with the app I have never had this issue until this weekend.

I am using premiere 2018 (12.1.1) for two reasons. I have the 2019 at work, and find that there are many bugs and random issues with that version. 

Since I have an older model computer at home, I have not upgraded to the 2019 version of premiere.  To edit with 4k and up footage I have to transcode proxies, which can have it's own host of issues but we don't need to go there.

Does anyone have a solve for this?

Thanks

L