Why can my external hard drive open on my laptop and not my computer?

I had a laptop since 2012 and last year I bought an external hard drive to backup files.

I got a brand new computer several weeks ago and I want to transfer my laptop files to the computer. Doing it by USB is a pain in the ass.

So since my external hard drive has a copy of everything already, I just want to copy and paste all that stuff directly into my new computer.

But now my new computer apparently can’t open the external hard drive.

I looked at it in the disk manager. It pops up as “Disk 1” and “Unknown” and there’s some issue where the external hard drive is “Unallocated”. I can’t initialize it because when I try to this error pops up:

“Data error: (cyclic redundancy check)”

I searched solutions and read to try using the command prompt but all I get is “Cannot open volume for direct access”

The external drive isn’t damaged or anything. I can still open it on my laptop and it’s fine there.

I’m starting to really lose patience here.