I had ANKI installed on computer A. I had to give that computer back to my employer when I left so i copied my Anki onto my external hard drive. For some reason I don’t think it worked so I did something and downloaded it again and was able to view all of my folders etc. when I pugged my external hard drive into my computer B. I never downloaded the ANKI program on computer B as I was waiting until I got my new computer C to use that to access my cards.
Now I have my computer C and i plug my external hard drive into the PC (windows 11) still haven’t downloaded the ANKI and when I open it from my external drive none of my cards are there. I then take the external drive and plug into computer B and open the anki file and all of my cards are there. Why might this be happening?
I’m not sure I understand what you copied to the hard drive, was it a backup of your collection?
In any case, if you have an Ankiweb account, you can just download Anki to your new computer and sync it with your account, and it will download your collection from the web.
Is it possible the cards are actually stored on the internal drive of computer B? That would explain why they can’t be seen on computer C. If you file>export your collection with media+scheduling on computer B and save it to the external drive, you can then import it on computer C.