ok guys here it goes. main hdd is going to fail sometime soon. on the main hdd i have the os installed and part of the accounts. the techs will reload a new hdd with a fresh install of centos 4.3. how can i keep my cpanel / whm settings, dns stuff and everything ? and just put it back on once the box is done ... currently i am moving the accts from hdd1 to hdd 2 but that will not be pretty much enough, and will be pain in the ass to reconfigure it all again. .... help help help

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Linux-Complete...ery-HOWTO/

The best thing is just to make image of your system and then extract it to your new hdd and with rescue disc configure it (boot loader etc...) This way you will have everything the same

it just happens that .. it's a webserver and it's running linux....

You can still make image of the system and extract it and configure it on other computer and just connect it then to your server and reboot. Couple of minutes downtime you can sure afford

if you have ever heard a hosting provider to make 80 gb image of the server data ...

Why not ... sure if you are hosting provider you have some storage media ? Or I did not understand exactly ... It seems that someone else is doing this for you ?

man you can't just put the data from a drive to another ... an os from a drive to another copy it and just expect to work and yes it's a dedicated server.

If you make exact image and all devs (hda!...etc...) are the same I don't see any reason why things should not work ... You just have to take care of mbr and thats it ! And yes this way you can expect everything to work. It is just hard drive we are talking about aren't we ?

You have two options:

- Backup all your accounts and restore them all (it's valid if you're server isn't already running on the new OS reloaded hard disk)

Or:
- http://forum.ev1servers.net/showthread.php?t=38797

Good Luck! Personally, I always prefer a backup/restore..