Volumio VS Raspian: mounting external USB drives

Hello everyone,
Im a tad, ok a LOT confused here.

As you know if youve read any of my posts, Im having almost zero luck getting sound from 2 different HW and SW setups regardless of how I try it.

Here’s what I got:

(2) RASPI 3B+
(1) Audio Injector Stereo DAC
(1) HIFIberry DAC+
7" HDMI screen [size=1]mobdro.bio/ luckypatcher.tips/ kodi.bio/[/size]
generic usb mouse and kbd
WIRED network connection
(1) seagate backup plus external USB drive 4TB drive that has all my music

last night for grins and because I wanted to get SOMETHING that worked sound I went w/ the Audio INjector DAC and plugged a headset into the 3.5 port ON the DAC

Loaded Raspbian whatever the latest img is 8/6?

loaded the audio injector drivers AND the test scripts and got test tones through my headset, nothing through my rca yet

then I tried to access my USB drive, not seen, tried to mount every way to Sunday to no avail

I tried MANY different cli commands to load the info on the drive and some of them didnt make a ton of sense (warning very large device attached sda) was only one id never seen before, loaded NTFS support and everything elkse I could think of NADA,

I was loading gpartd to repartition the drive into (2) 2TB when i realized it was 0030 and I had to get up in 4 hours

then today at work i remembered

Volumio identified, browsed and read from my drive just fine as (1) 4TB drive, somewhere along the way volumio proved i didnt need to break the drive up

BTW: Just to kill time, I downl;oaded an MP3 from a teachiong site I use and played IT through the headphones just fine.

i am SOOOO confused.

I would REALLY love to setup volumio, I loaded raspbian trying to demonstrate a known good configuration, and I ALMOST got there…

any ideas???