Sims 4 not updating

(sorry had to delete the other one cause I realized I should probably be posting my tech issues in the tech forum and not the general discussions one, my bad 💀)
So I haven't fully played my game since like...last Thursday or Friday (basically before the update came out cause I thought the update was going to drop on the 16th but it didn't) because my UI was messed up. Took time Friday to fix the ui problem and didn't want to update my game because I was scared it was going to break the thing I was using for my dlc since I spent months trying to get it to finally work but unfortunately the gallery doesn't work offline and I need something from the gallery but that's besides the point.

Basically, I tried to update my game and it was updating at first but then it would got somewhere between 90% and told something was messed up? I forgot what the exact message said but it was something relating to delta or installer or something, I don't know. But yesterday my ea kept getting stuck on the preparing part of the update no matter how many times I paused it, unpaused it, cancelled it, and tried updating again. Today however, it is updating...but not installing my update. Like I would press update and it would update but then restart again constantly. repairing it didn't do anything since repairing is doing the same thing. I tried everything I could I turned off ea background services, I restarted the app multiple times, I closed the app, restarted my computer, did app recovery. Everything under the sun I attempted to do and it's still not updating. Maybe it's this cheap, no name external hard drive I've gotten off of Aliexpress months ago but my sims 4 downloaded and runs just fine on it before so idk why this update specifically is not installing. My last resort is to uninstall and reinstall the game but I don't know how that's going to affect the stuff I'm using for my dlc and I spent months trying to get that to work so I don't wanna go through that stress again...

I mean my game works just fine offline but again, I need something off of my gallery and my gallery doesn't work offline so I'm forced to update my game to get it but my game is not updating  and I don't know what to do😭I never had this problem before. Yeah it updates slow as Christmas on this hard drive but it would just download and stop...and restart for no reason...