DiskWarrior

It might be that the file system on the LaCie mini hub HD is really bad. Have you got a copy of DiskWarrior or DriveGenius 2? ...

NO! Thankfully! did you try another computer - maybe w/ an older OS? different cables? Also try to repair with DiskWarrior?

Get a copy of diskwarrior: http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/index.html

I did repair permissions and run DiskWarrior but nothing's changed. ...

Nope, not really. You can try something like Data Rescue II, or perhaps even DiskWarrior, but typically, when you delete a partition, it's gone. If the data is super-important, you may want to try a professional data recovery service like drivesavers.com.

DiskWarrior. The end-all, be-all of disk repair programs. If it don't work on your drive, nothing short of a very expensive, professional data recovery service will be able to do anything to it. This finicky drive -- is it your boot drive?

r the drive, it gave me a more specific error message, something about a btree error at a particular node. I googled that and found that most people recommended DiskWarrior to deal with this sort of problem. ...

Well for some reason the internal drive is getting worse, diskwarrior and disk utility can see the drive, although it's lost it's name - but neither can repair it as the option is greyed out. It disappeared altogether last night but I realised after leaving it running and trying to get it to work the mac had been on for days and was hot so I shut it down and checked it this...

he drive came up, but things were slow still, it took forever to copy anything so I tried disk utility, it couldn't repair it. I tried drive genius, same thing. DiskWarrior 4.1.1 same thing. ...

You said that you tried everything? If you create a new user account, and logout, then login in to that new user - do you still see the same problem?