All was well with Oman until June 5, when the tropical cyclone Gonu anchored itself inland. Wind speeds exceeded 240 km/hr and cyclone Gonu was classified as the worst cyclonic storm ever recorded in the North Indian Ocean. The most intense cyclone in the Arabian Sea had brought in its wake severe rainfall, thunder storms and giant waves which forced evacuation of 7000 people from the coastal areas of Muscat.

Widespread destruction and flash floods due to the cyclone Gonu knocked down communication links and isolated thousands for hours. Oman faced power outages and business losses to the tune of $ 4 billion. Such a storm was rare in North Indian Ocean and even rarer in the desert areas of Oman. Classified as a class 5 cyclone, Gonu brought along High winds, great gale force, storm surges and tornado activities coupled with power outages and transportation difficulties which made rescue efforts come to a standstill. 20,000 people were affected while another 27 were reported missing four days after the storm dissipated. Waves as high as 10 metres forced large amounts of water to the coast making the ports noperative including the main port of Sohar.
The failure of both the Oman desalination plants triggered massive drinking water shortages in Muscat as the first plant Ghubrah, lost supplies of natural gas, halting production; while the second, Barka, sustained damaged switchgear due to flooding. These plants provided water to Muscat's 631,000 residents and surrounding areas when they were functional. Violent winds, incredible waves,
torrential rains and floods associated with this phenomenon gripped the immediate neighbors of Oman including United Arab Emirates. The storm grazed the Oman coastline before finally crossing over the Gulf Of Oman and entering Iran. Roads, trains and almost every system of transport was disrupted due to water logging and land slides.

The cyclone Gonu, which means a bag made of palm leaves in the language of the Maldives, finally dissipated (even after a tropical cyclone is said to be extra tropical or dissipated, it can still have gale-force winds and drop several inches of rainfall) as it headed inward towards the heart of Iran leaving a vast trail of destruction behind. People returned to their homes and life began to crawl towards normalcy. Traders returned to trucking oil barrels .Offices opened up -- but computers did not!!. Water logging, torrential rains and mud had
jammed computers for good. Drives had crashed and so had the data. Data backups had either backfired or were corrupted badly.

The computers were confronted with a multitude of problems. The data loss was
due to system crashes and power outages. Grime and moisture rendered the hard disks useless. Lives were taken hostage to data recovery and it was in these situations companies contacted various Data recovery services. At Stellar, we received extensively damaged disks. Time is critical to data recovery therefore, being the proud owners of India's first - Class 100 clean room, we swung into action immediately. The efforts to salvage data began at war footing.

Stellar data recovery experts and clean room technicians worked on the drives till the data was fully retrieved. Hard disks were cleaned; data was recovered and saved on the media chosen by our customers. Damaged parts like read/write heads were replaced from our exhaustive inventory .Sophisticated equipments and trained hands of our recovery experts together lifted any traces of data they could find. Although this involved many complex procedures like drive dissection and analysis, drive imaging etc: most data was recovered with full file structures.

During the recovery process, our team encountered a number of challenges like:

Lodging of water in the disk drives Bent/ broken spindle motors, Damaged platters, Scratching of platter surface due to mud, Crashing of hard drives due to physical impact of water, Damage to read/write head etc.

Ignorance of data safety measures aggravated the problem in most cases.

To prevent this we are giving below a few precautions in case you have suffered similar drive damage.

Do not attempt to put on your system. It may result in short circuits and data loss. Do not try to dry your system as drying may leave residue on your platters
causing electro mechanical damage. Freezing the drive is not an option, do not consider it.

Immediately put off any systems showing signs of damage and pack the affected drives into shock proof material o send them for recovery.

Intelligent, timely and prompt data recovery is possible only if adequate measures are taken. Any strange noises and sounds from the computer shouldn't be ignored. Data backups must be maintained and updated. The data that has been recovered must not be restored to the affected drive. In spite of all this, if you still lose your data, never attempt to carry out the repair yourself.

Data recovery can revive both you and your organization. But it must always be done by professionals. Stellar has over 15 years of experience in data recovery software & services. It made sense for the Gonu victims to approach the best in business to bail them out from their worst data horrors. Armed with the "never say die" attitude, Stellar Information systems always welcomes its customers and sincerely hopes to find solutions for all their problems. We did the same for them and their drives were up and running within no time.

Life may take sometime to normalize in the devastated Gonu .But we can still feel proud of ourselves for doing what few others would. Returning people to their offices and giving them hope where no one could.