Just wanted to let everyone know that I actually got this fixed so I'm going to post how and then a mod can lock this thread if they so choose.

What I ended up having to do, and to be honest I don't understand the fine details here but it worked, was download a program called easeus partition master.

In the program, I had to click on my external drive and tell it to convert GPT to MBR. *If you use that program specifically, you also have to apply the change before it is finalized*

I don't know why exactly this worked, I had a friend recommend it to me but, it did in fact fix the problem.

Hope this helps anyone else that has the problem in the future!