Swapping Out Drives in Live cPanel System

Hi everyone,
I'm looking to replace my primary drive in a live cPanel-based server with a new, larger drive. I'm trying to figure out how to do this with the absolute minimum downtime possible. Can anyone offer recommendations?

Ideas I've considered:

1.) Doing a fresh RHEL5 and cPanel provisioning on the new drive while the old drive is installed in the server's third drive bay and then using WHM's migration tools to reactivate all the accounts. This seems like it would lead to a fairly lengthy downtime.

2.) Installing the new drive initially as the third drive, using some utility (dd? partimage? Something else -- recommendations/confirmations welcome!) to clone the partitions from the old drive to the new one and then (if it wasn't done as part of the transfer) resize the partitions to fill the new drive.

Recommendations?

Thanks,
Tim

 

Thanks!

That might be the way to go. This all transpired while talking to my datacenter (SoftLayer) and they offered a good deal for me to upgrade my current server, part of which involves replacing the 250GB drives I have now with more spacious 500GB ones. Trouble is trying to figure out how to do this efficiently!

I'm not sure I can get the same offer if I replace the server outright, although maybe that is worthwhile. In any case, that is why I was hoping to instead clone the old drive onto the new before making the permanent switch.

The DC is trading drives with me, so I won't actually retain possession of the old drives once the data is off of them.

Am I going after a semi-impossible quest, perhaps?

Thanks,
Tim

 

OK, here is another, wild idea. As long as I am doing this, could I some how (if I had the DC put in two new drives at the same time) not only do what I was trying to do before (clone the data from the old disk) but also turn the two new disks into a software RAID 1 array?

Or, should I give up on trying to migrate on a live server and just start over?

If I do start over, is there an easy way to make sure I pull in not just client accounts, but most of the tweaks I've applied to standard server components?

Thanks,
Tim