user cant get to backup partition - consistently

[niteboater]

helping a user with SuperDuper v2.5

they are using a external USB 2.0 drive

a. have been Smart Updating (seemingly ok) - no restore has been done to test the backup's yet

b. the backup partition is on "MBP BU" which is a 100 Gb partition in GUID that holds the clone of the user MBP drive

c. consistently - the destination drive will appear, but is greyed out

Tried:

remove and reinstall of SD client
remove "settings" folder

to no avail.

I do notice when I ls -al /Volumes that the MBP BU partition comes up as:

lrwxr-xr-x 1 root admin 1 Mar 16 12:05 MBP BU -> /

but Im not sure if this is just a broken symlink issue or not.

Any advice appreciated