[evoLver]

I'm such a newby. I'm trying to reformat my external FW drive before I copy data back to it.

I tried to 'zero out data' as a security option under Disc Utility/Erase, in the hopes it would be a more thorough erasing. It was supposed to take 75 minutes, but halfway into it I received an error message , "underlying task report reported failure on exit". now the volume is named "disk 1s6" and the HD does not appear on my desktop. I'm scared to mess around with it, I don't want to screw up my drive, it worked perfect before.

[C.A.T.S. CEO]

Erase it again, this time without the "zero out" option. You won't screw anything up more as it is now.

[CatOne]

Still, that's a waste of time, unless you have something you need to securely delete. You don't need to write 0's to something to erase it.

[evoLver]

Tried to erase it again, but it's not mounting the drive. I tried Repair disc under First Aid and it says;
Verify and Repair disk “disk1s6”
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Invalid B-tree node size
Volume check failed.
Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit

1 HFS volume checked
1 volume could not be repaired because of an error

[evoLver]

ok it's mounted.

My concern is that I have to have the exact same file directory as before, when i copy over my files back to this drive. And I don't remember if It originally used a volume. In other words, under mount point it says Volumes/Lacie HD2006

is "Volumes" always a prefix to the name of your drive?

[hookem2oo7]

yes, all drives that mount are in /Volumes