Unable to view photos on external hard drive

[dea37s]

I have been using XnView for the past four years or so and haven't had any issues until now. I usually have no problems viewing photos on my external hard drive, but just recently, I've been unable to access my photos from there. Sometimes it would work, but then it would show an error message saying that the picture was unable to load, or something along those lines. The folders within the hard drive all have a small red button in the bottom right corner. Now, it's just showing an icon of my external hard drive, but it's not even allowing me to expand it to see the folders in it. I do have editing permissions on the external hard drive, so we can rule that problem out.

I can't seem to find any solutions to my current issue online, but if anyone has an idea of what's going on, please let me know! It's really frustrating because this has never happened before