alright, thanks for the help. i determined that the SmartWare VCD was in fact preventing the actual hard disk partition from being mounted, for some unknown reason. the VCD partition could not be deleted through traditional means. so i searched for kind of a long time but lo and behold there was an application in the VCD itself that can disable it. 1 part mad at myself, 2 parts still hating that damn bloatware. bane of everyone's existence. thanks for the help Klojum. appreciate it. FYI the hard disk was a WD My Passport Elite 500GB from 2010.
i went back to NTFS for Windows compatibility. it's working fine on LibreELEC now.