[rhn-users] upgrade question

[Vortek, Eater Of Souls!]

Hello,
I'm just wondering if there is a way to either simply upgrade to a new
version, or run a system restore of sorts. please excuse the story, but
it will help explain my question I think.
I had a power outage yesterday, and when I finally was able to reboot, a
lot of my system seemed to be corrupt, for an example, samba no longer
accepts connections from windows XP computers on my network, and cron
doesn't seem to be running properly.
I'm currently running redhat 8.0, and I'm just wondering if there is a
way I can pop my redhat 8 disks in to my cdrom drive, and do some form
of system restore, or if I can simply pop redhat 9 disks in and upgrade
to rh9 preserving all my configuration files, and home folders.
Any help will be greatly appriciated, thanks.