Library hosted on external drive won't show Projects in Browser when using different Mac

The goal is to use one external drive containing the media and Library without issues on two different Macs.

Details
I have a bunch of media in one Event and set up another Event as a container for Projects in a library on an external Western Digital 2TB drive (labeled "My Passport for Mac") connected via USB (not ideal, I know - but problematic?). All media is contained on this drive outside the Library. After building a few projects on my MacBook Pro, I realized that I sorely needed a faster Mac. Note that the Browser in the screenshots below are using the "Group clips by file type" option found in the View menu.

So I connect the external WD drive to an iMac 21.5" 2.7GHz Quad-core i5 Mid-2011 8GB RAM (I know, not much faster) and open the Library in FCPX (also 10.1.3) and it prompts me with a message saying some media was missing, and gave me options to select a drive containing the missing media, and where to find backups. As far as I know the only media not on the external drive was PNG image and an MP3 file, which were back on my MacBook Pro's internal drive.



Here's where I may have gone wrong - I selected a new location for the cache (the same folder as the one containing the Library) and chose 'Do not back up' as the backup option.

So finally, I'm looking in the Library within FCPX, and the media Event works fine, but within the Event set up for projects, nothing shows in the Browser except an import button.

When checking inside the library package itself in the Finder, everything seems to be in order.

So I test creating a project called "Test Project" in the projects Event, and nothing appears there - it seems to just go into the void.

Coming back to my MacBook Pro
A new section called "No Data" appears in the Browser - within both Events. In the media Event this contains something called "Test Project" with a compound clip icon. Attempts to delete this crash FCPX.



In the projects event, this "No Data" section contains a compound clip that I created before attempting to edit using the iMac, but it appears to be fine.



Any tips for avoiding this situation next time I want to edit on another Mac?
Any other relevant info or insight into this "No Data" section is greatly welcomed and appreciated as well!

I don't understand what you're doing in the very first sentence. You made a new library on a separate drive to hold your projects? Where's the media for the projects? In what library, in what events? You can't edit from one library to another without duplicating the media or having the media external and available to both the event on one drive and the project on another.

You browser is grouped by file type. Compounds, sync clips, multicam clips, have no file type. That's what No Data means, It's the same as grouping by date and having clips with no embedded date/time stamp.

The second image looks as if you have five projects and are editing pieces of a single compound clip into them, though I'm not sure why there are no clips in the browser. You should at least see the clips that are in the compound.

Hi Tom, thank you for the feedback.
There's only one Library being used, and all original media is on the same external drive that hosts the library.
The goal is to use that external drive containing the media and Library without issues on two different Macs.

Hope that makes more sense. I've added some clarifications to my original post.

Any idea why my projects wouldn't appear when I connected the drive to the iMac?

It's kind of hard to tell seeing only parts of the browser and nothing of the libraries and events structure.

Hmm...
As far as the library list goes (the left panel shown in the first screen shot), there is no structure inside the Event holding the media, other than a long list of keyword collections, and an auto-generated folder labeled "People" with some Smart Collections in it.

The Event holding the Projects shows nothing below it when the disclosure triangle is turned - with 10.1.x, the structure you see (if projects are the only thing in the Event) is what's shown in the Browser.

There's not much else to see:
The 2nd screen shot shows the Browser with the media Event selected in the Library list.
The 3rd screen shot shows the Browser with the projects Event selected in the Library list.

Perhaps this helps:

Try the usual trashing preferences, repairing permissions, rebooting. The user is admin I presume.

I can't see any reason why this wouldn't work.