Can a Virus cause an external drive to be invisible

hi folks,
i used my mac book pro to shovel some really, really old files I kept on CDs all the time onto my external western digital "my passport" 2.5" drive. I am using the drive already quite a while but after copying a few CDs I was first unable to eject the CD. Then my system got really slow. I forced to restart the finder application. The system nearly crushed and I had to hard reset my machine.
Once the system had started up again, I could eject the CD but from then on my external drive didn't show anymore on the left hand side of the finder. When I open the disk utility application the external drive is listed. And when I check the file system the following result comes up. (Note: (über)prüfen means to check)
Volume „My Passport“ überprüfen
Dateisystem prüfen** /dev/disk1s1
** Phase 1 - Preparing FAT
** Phase 2 - Checking Directories
** Phase 3 - Checking for Orphan Clusters
221807 files, 49154784 KiB free (1536087 clusters)
However, the disk utility application is able to find the external disk. Thus, I was wondering if the copied files (mainly mp3's of which I am not totally sure where some of them are from) my contain any virus that I now have put on my mac os x? I have never had these files on my mac before. they are that old, they are still from my time as a windows user, sorry.
hope anyone has an idea what might be going on here. Is there any chance to check my system for viruses or malware os x internally. As far as I have read, anti virus programs of third parties are not really recommendable for mac users...

I'm not really understanding entirely what you saw, but I will tell you that it's not a virus. That's just not how malware works on the Mac.
You say that you saw the external hard drive in Disk Utility and repaired it, but then you said Disk Utility can't find the external drive. Does that mean that it was there, but then disappeared? Or does it mean that you can see the physical drive in Disk Utility, but not the volume?
If the drive itself no longer shows up in Disk Utility, there's probably a hardware problem. There may be a connection problem (loose cable, etc) or the drive itself may have died.
If the drive is visible but the volume is missing, it's probably become extremely badly corrupted. You'll want to repartition (erase) the drive, assuming there's nothing on it that isn't backed up somewhere else, and start over.

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Benhermies wrote:
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