I see simple steps to get my CentOS machine into Rescue mode for file check and such but I need rw Rescue mode to clone my server off of Rackspace using rsync.
What are my options for allowing rsync at the lowest possible level?
If you open a ticket with our support team they can boot your droplet to a Recovery ISO. This is a Debian based Live ISO image which will allow you to access your disk and mount it in r/w mode. Cloning a disk in this matter is not something we can provide support for but our support team would be happy to place your droplet into recovery mode and return it to boot from it's disk once you're done. One thing to note is that only Fedora, Ubuntu 15.04, and FreeBSD droplets use user-managed kernels (meaning they boot directly to the kernel in your filesystem rather than an external kernel image) so you will want to start with a droplet from one of these if you're cloning your whole OS.
Thanks for the response,
So to be clear, I ned and will only be using CentOS.
This means I cannot get to the R/W image for my instance?
Thanks
R/W access from the recovery ISO is available on all OS options except for FreeBSD (which uses a UFS2 filesystem which the Linux kernel cannot reliably write to) and CoreOS which uses multiple btrfs partitions to swap it's live system in order to do updates. You should have no problem getting r/w access to your filesystem on CentOS using the recovery ISO.