Reimaging Your Machine

At any time you wish you may reimage, or reinstall, your machine. This action is irreversible, and will mean that your machine loses all data stored upon it.

The end result of a reimage will be that your machine is running a pristine installation.

If there are local files upon your machine please ensure you have them backed up prior to your reimage.

To backup files you might want to take advantage of the free backup space which is provided with each of our machines.

Getting Started

Once you’ve connected to your console shell you may begin the reimaging process by pressing “Ctrl+p Ctrl+o” to invoke the actions menu.

From the actions menu choose “Reimage your machine”, and you’ll be guided through the process.

Reimaging illustrated

Here is each step illustrated with an explanation:

Confirm Your Intention To Reimage

While there are further questions, you need to confirm that you understand your server will be wiped clean.

Select Your Distribution

Pick whichever distribution you would like – if you’re not familiar with Linux you probably want the Bytemark Symbiosis distribution.

Enter Your New Root Password

You will be asked to enter your root password twice so you don’t accidentally mistype it and lock yourself out:

Reimaging Begins

Finally the process begins:

Once the process has completed, which will take approximately 5 minutes, your server will restart automatically.

Advanced reimaging

For dedicated server customers only (at present), if you want more control over the reimaging process, you can reimage your server from the command line and specify a few more options. See our reimaging reference page for more information on how to do this.