Q: Serious virus attack. Hard drive missing. Can I recover?

Try booting in safe mode, Try safe mode if your Mac doesn't finish starting up - Apple Support. What anti virus app did you run? Anti virus apps are not recommended since they may do harm to your computer.

The symptoms you describe are also common with hard drive failure.

The normal method of recovery in any situation is to restore from your backup.

If your drive has failed, and you don't have a backup, then you would need either file recovery software if the drive still rotates, or a file recover service if it has completely died.

There is no known malware that does what you describe (except maybe the AV software itself). 99.999% of all "threats" detected by AV software will only affect the Windows OS.

What "virus scanning software" did you use? It's entirely possible that whatever you ran did more damage than any possible malware did.

As for recovering your data, you do have a backup, right?

xenabakercakes wrote:

 

I was noticing some typical signs of malware so ran a virus scanning software,

That's never a good idea, since all such things can do is make existing problems worse, or create problems of their own.

What were those signs? Did you create a backup?

Those things are just scams. Read Phony "tech support" / "ransomware" popups and web pages.

"Avast" is arguably malware in itself, but that distinction isn't important. Non-Apple "anti-virus" products should never be installed on a Mac.

Uninstall Avast. It tends to interfere with the computer's operation while providing minimal to no benefit.

Avast

Avast Un-install

One of the things Safe Mode does is to check the boot volume's directory for inconsistencies and attempt to repair them. If it's taking a very long while to do that, it's probably confirmation that your hard disk drive is in a failed state. That would be consistent with the observations in your original description.

If it eventually starts, you should immediately create a backup and replace the hard disk drive at your earliest convenience.

"A very long while" is more than a few minutes. If it does not start within a half hour or so, it's not likely to start at all. You have nothing to lose by letting it continue though, however long that takes.