I have 2 computers both running different versions of Linux Mint, a laptop with: Linux Mint 19.3 Tricia base: Ubuntu 18.04 bionic, Desktop Cinnamon 4.4.8 and a desktop on which I just recently installed Linux Mint 20.3 Una base: Ubuntu 20.04 focal, Desktop MATE 1.26.0
The laptop connects to a USB external HDD attached to my Netgear home router with no problems but the new desktop install will not mount or even see it at all. This HDD was originally set up on a Windows network, I have install all the samba software that I can find suggested on both devices, both have the most recent kernal releases, when I try to connect on the desktop using the smb4k app I get an mount.cifs(2) error, I have tried some of the suggestions I find when I search this error with negative results. Any suggestions, I am not totally new to Linux but am not very proficient using a cli so it helps if I can find step by step instructions on using a cli.

Welcome to LinuxQuestions.

Without knowing model number of the router I will guess your Netgear is running SMB version 1 which for most recent linux distributions running samba version >=4.10 (or something close to that) it has been completely removed. With version 4 <.10 SMB version 1 may work or has been disabled.

Unless you manually install an older version of samba on your computers your basically out of luck. Using the file browser is another issue

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This issue solved, My router is quite old and is most likely not supported by newer OS.
Thank you for the help.

1.0 support was taken out of the server but I still think you can pass the version in fstab as 1.0 and it will work. At least it is legal in the man page of like Ubuntu.