updated to Ventura 13.6 and now my external SSD won't mount

Right after I updated to Ventura 13.6, my older Seagate SSD is no longer recognized by my Mac. Went into Disk utility, ran disk first aid, which came out ok, then I tried to mount it again and got the "Cannot mount, com.apple.Disk error 119930868 error code. I tried three times to run a soft start up and it never initiated. The day before I was transferring files onto my new SSD, Seagate as well. I had no issues. It was getting pretty full though, and I was about to run CleanMyMac on the, now unmounted, Seagate SSD. Any ideas? Yes, I have checked that its set up in my System settings to see all external drives.. Im at a loss here and I really need the files on that SSD. If I try to restore it it will delete all files, correct?