>>105814954
>somehow end up mounted and loaded in my external drive as the home folder and no applications work anymore
If I understand you correctly here, it seems like you've installed Linux onto your external drive as well. So when you rebooted your PC, you booted into that specific installation of it. You're effectively dual booting two Linux systems in that case.

What you need to do is, in GNOME Disks or KDE Partition Manager:
- find your external drive
- select all partitions and delete them all
- create new partition for the entire drive and select ext4 or btrfs (if asked, choose "anyone can access it" instead of "root access")
- click apply/format and wait

>A drive I was intentionally never touching or changing to begin with now just fails to function for some reason
Are you sure you didn't do something to it by accident?

>"Error mounting system-managed device /dev/sda1: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda1, missing codepage or helper program, or other error"
I have no idea what that means. But here's what ChatGPT spits out, maybe it'll help you.