External drive not reading

Hello,

I do not intend to hijack this thread, but didn't want to create a new one because this may be my only post on these forums. I am having an issue with an external hard drive. It is an Iomega external hard drive, I believe 2 TB. I can plug it into my samsung smart TV and access the contents no problem. But when I try to access it through my lab top I get an error "F:\ is not accessible. The parameter is incorrect." It also does not work on the desktop computer in my apartment building's business center. However, I am currently at the local public library where I rented a Chromebook, and I was able to access the drive and the contents inside.

I have tried changing the disk drive letter, among other things, and no luck getting it to work on my normal labtop (which is an ASUS with Windows 10 OS). I have used this hard drive with this labtop in the past. It is hard to know exactly when it stopped working, but it's possible it was around the time I started using the HD with my smart TV. I have a LOT of data on this hard drive, and I would prefer not to erase it, nor buy a new labtop just to use it.

Any suggestions/ideas? Keep in mind I am not the most computer savvy person, so try and use language a peasant like me could understand. Thank you in advance.

How is the drive formatted? ntfs? or something else. Since any windows machine can't access it then I'm assuming its in a format that windows isn't compatible with.

I honestly do not know, and not sure how to check on this chromebook (first time using one). "Right clicking" only gives me the option of format drive and eject disk. I don't want to format because it will wipe the drive.

Even if its formatted wrong, I'm not sure if you can convert without losing data. I'm not familiar with chromebooks. You could use a boot disk for a disk partitioning program such as hirens boot cd which has many programs on it. There would be a few programs on there that would tell you what format the drive is in. You would have to use either laptop or desktop.

Many smart TVs use a sort of Linux operating system under the hood. Most likely your TV formatted the drive to something like Ext 4 which Windows won't recognize.

Try installing Paragon EXT for Windows on the computer (the free version will work, just slowly) and see if you can access the drive then.